


International Harvester

by alpacasandravens



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Farmer!dean, Fluff and Angst, Human Castiel (Supernatural), M/M, Marriage Proposal, Post-Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, dean becomes a farmer, mostly soft, the futures that these characters DESERVE fuck 15x20
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27707068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: Dean didn’t know what to do, after.He had never thought there would be an after, not for him. There would be for Sammy, he’d make damn sure of that. But for him? He had always known, with a solemn certainty deep in his chest, that he would die young and he would go down swinging. He’d told Sam that, ages ago, back before there were angels and when demons were above their pay grade.But he has to do something, so he buys a farm.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester
Comments: 54
Kudos: 292





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> what the hell was the finale. what did i even watch. ???? anyway here's a fic where Dean DOESN'T die and Eileen and Cas exist, not Sam's blurry wife and (the tune of Somebody I Used To Know). This is my coping mechanism.  
> Rated T for light swearing. Also money doesn't exist in this universe I know canonically Dean is broke and the things he does in this fic require a lot of money but all I can say is creative license babey

Dean didn’t know what to do, after.

He had never thought there would be an after, not for him. There would be for Sammy, he’d make damn sure of that. But for him? He had always known, with a solemn certainty deep in his chest, that he would die young and he would go down swinging. He’d told Sam that, ages ago, back before there were angels and when demons were above their pay grade. 

The concept is laughable now. He used to wish, back when Zachariah and everyone else hounded him day in and day out, back when Gadreel walked around in Sam’s body and when they’d first found out Lucifer was going to have a child, that none of this had happened. That he would wake up and everything would be simple again, that angels wouldn’t exist and the only thing on his and Sam’s plate would be finishing off a pesky vampire nest. 

He doesn’t wish that anymore.

Not because he likes this new reality. That would be too much, no one could like the things that have happened to him. Not the Mark of Cain, not watching everyone around him die, and die again. 

It’s more that he had gotten used to it. Waking up in the morning to find out a celestial being had it out for him personally? Just another Thursday. But somehow, he’d built a family among it all, him and Sam and Cas and Jack and so many others along the way. 

Now that it was over, he didn’t know what to do.

Sam did. Sam had always had his shit figured out, back when he was putting in his application to Stanford, and he still did now. 

Of course, he stuck around for a while. While Dean drank himself stupid until Sam threatened to put him in the panic room to detox. While he stared day in and day out at his computer, trying to find cases only to be greeted by a call from Jody, from Charlie, hell, even from Garth telling him they were already on it. 

“Eileen’s coming over for the weekend,” Sam said, poking his head inside the library. “That ok?”

Dean looked up from whatever book he hadn’t really been reading. “Yeah. It’ll be good to see her.” 

This was a lie. It’s not that Dean didn’t like seeing Eileen. He did, and he was happy for her and Sam. But when she was over, or when Sam was at her place and the bunker echoed empty around him, he was reminded that Sam had a future, had happiness, and he didn’t. He had a car that he couldn’t possibly work on any more and a dead best friend who had apparently been in love with him and nothing to hunt. 

He took a deep breath and went back to the book before him. It seemed to be an explanation of some counter-curse measures for protection from witches. Dean hadn’t faced a witch in over a year.

He tried to bring Cas back, once. Found a portal spell to cut a hole between worlds and set it up down in the dungeons. (Not the one where Cas died. He couldn’t bring himself to even look at the door to that place.) The spell traced a bright line through the air and fizzled out.

Dean couldn’t even bring himself to be angry. Sam had hidden all the alcohol during Dean’s original grief-fueled benders and he didn’t have the energy to buy more, so he just sat there, numb and hurting, until he passed out.

He did find a case eventually. Nothing he couldn’t handle - a vengeful spirit in the nearest corner of Wyoming. 

He didn’t tell Sam. Instead, he packed a bag and drove away, sending Sam a quick text when he was far enough away from the bunker that turning around would have been stupid. 

_ On a hunt. Should be back in a couple days. Don’t wait up. _

He switched his phone off and kept driving.

Hunting was different, in the after. God was powerless and his kid was God and what was even the point? Dean drove, the fields gradually changing to a dry scrub the further west he got. Kansas was empty, just miles upon miles of corn and wheat fields, with a barn or a silo or a pasture full of cows cropping up occasionally. It was beautiful. It was what he knew. Wyoming was empty in a different way, the desert harsh outside the Impala. It still looked like it went on forever, but this was the type of forever that promised blisteringly hot days and freezing nights, promised getting turned around and the desert not letting you find your way back. 

He didn’t turn on the radio, probably wouldn’t get signal out here anyway. Briefly, Dean dug through the glove box for tapes, but the first one he pulled out wasn’t his. Not really. “13 Best Zepp Tracks” glared at him in his own handwriting, and Dean shoved it back in the glove box. He wasn’t thinking about Cas. He was on a job, and if he let himself think, he wouldn’t get it done. So he kept the radio off and drove into the blazing sun of Wyoming in silence. 

The hunt was easy. Sure, it was annoying not having Sam’s gargantuan self helping him dig up the body, but salting and burning was just as easy solo as it had been with two. 

Sam texted him, and the notification sat on Dean’s lock screen, mocking him.

_ By yourself? _

He didn’t know if that meant Sam didn’t think he was capable of hunting by himself or if he was just hurt at being excluded, but it didn’t really matter. This was going to be Dean’s life now. Sam had Eileen, and they were happy. Sam had never even wanted to be a hunter anyway, and now he wouldn’t have to be. But for Dean? It was all that he’d ever known. 

The body - an 1880s frontiersman who kept hijacking trains, of all things - crackled in front of him. It wasn’t cold, but he stood near the fire anyway. 

_ Yeah. Took care of it, be back tomorrow. _

So what if he replied to Sam almost a day late? He wasn’t dead, and he didn’t need any help. 

The motel room that night was empty. That shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. Dean splurged on a room with a queen bed and stretched out across it, still in his dirt-covered jeans and dusty flannel. The ceiling was the kind of white that hadn’t been repainted since maybe the 90s and had a bit of water damage, but Dean stared at it like it was the most interesting thing in the world. 

He fiddled with his phone for a while, flipping it between his fingers, before realizing there was nobody to call. There were no demons anymore, all locked in Hell, angels were in Heaven, and the frequency of monster attacks had drastically dropped. Pretty much all the hunters he knew were settling down, keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior but mostly just living. Dean wasn’t sure he knew how to do that.

He didn’t want to talk to Sam and he couldn’t talk to Cas (because he was dead, a fact Dean managed to push out of his mind until it rammed into him like the semi that had killed him the first time), so Dean ended up praying.

“Hey, kid,” he said, unsure of himself. It seemed so strange to be praying to his son, even if that kid was God. “How’s it going up there? That is, if you are up there. I dunno.”

Jack didn’t appear, didn’t send any kind of a sign to let Dean know he was listening, but that was okay. He trusted he could hear him. 

“I hope it’s good. I hope being God is what you wanted. Things down here are… hell, they’re so much better. I can’t say thank you enough, really. For bringing everybody back. I haven’t seen Sam so happy since… well, since before Dad went missing. And I know it’s unfair of me to ask anything else, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to live on my own.” 

Without Sam, who he knows is going to settle down in the white picket fence life he always should have had, he doesn’t say. Without Cas, who sacrificed himself over and over for Dean without ever letting on why, not until it was too late. 

“So if you could just send me a sign, or however you’re doing it. I know you said hands-off, and I don’t expect your help, but… please.”

There was nothing, and Dean sighed. He should really get up, wash the dirt of the hunt off, but he couldn’t bring himself to. Instead, he closed his eyes, still on top of the sheets, and fell asleep.

“Do you wanna come on a walk with me?” Sam asked, sticking his head into the living room a couple days after he got back.

Dean looked up from where he had been watching reruns of The Sopranos (sue him, it was interesting). “I’m kinda busy,” he said.

He was not busy. He had been sitting in this exact spot on the couch for four or so hours now, and the burger he’d bought still sat, uneaten, on the table in front of him. 

“Come on,” Sam said, and it wasn’t optional. 

The thing about taking walks when they lived in the bunker was that there was nowhere to walk. This wasn’t a neighborhood where they could go around the block a couple times, and it wasn’t near a park where there were trails to follow. There was just a two-lane highway stretching off into the distance and empty fields on either side. 

“I’m moving out,” Sam said when they were a good distance from the bunker. “And you are too.”

“You kicking me out, Sammy?” Dean said jokingly. 

“Eileen and I have been talking, and I’m going to move in with her.”  _ In Des Moines _ , were the unspoken words.  _ Far from here. _

“Good for you,” Dean said, and he meant it. Sam was happy with Eileen. They deserved each other. 

“You shouldn’t stay here by yourself.” 

This was true. The bunker was massive, and even when Sam was there, Dean’s footsteps echoed then stopped, the sound eaten up by the seemingly endless space. It had been a home, but only with all of them there. Sam, Dean, Cas, and Jack. Even with just him and Sam, there was a tangible sense of emptiness. By himself, Dean knew he wouldn’t do well. But there was nowhere else to go. 

“Well I ain’t moving in with you.”

Sam laughed in the way that acknowledged Dean’s attempt at humor while not going so far as to say he thought it was funny. “I’m not asking you to. But you should have a place. Somewhere you can live, not just a place to sleep.” 

“I’m living just fine here.” Dean didn’t know why he bothered arguing, he knew Sam was right.

Sam raised his eyebrows. 

“Okay, okay. But I don’t know what you want me to do.” Dean shoved his hands in his pockets and pulled his jacket a little tighter around himself as though that would somehow ward off emotional vulnerability. “It’s not like I have a girl waiting on me.” 

Sam’s shoulders were hunched in that way he does when he’s trying to make himself smaller, and Dean hates that he’s doing that here, with him, because he’s afraid of upsetting him. Things shouldn’t be like that between them. 

“Your future doesn’t have to be a girl, you know.”

Dean glared at him. 

Sam raised his hands in surrender. “I’m just saying, you can just… be you. By yourself, if you want. Make some friends, I don’t know. But if you’re here, you’re going to isolate yourself, and we both know that won’t end well.”

“Yeah, okay. But where am I supposed to go?”

“Where do you want to be?”

Dean had no idea. 

It turned out, one meeting with a real estate agent later, that while Dean didn’t know where he wanted to live, he did have some very strong opinions about where he did not want to live. 

“What about this place?” the agent had asked, pulling up the listing of the second-floor apartment in a duplex just over the border, in Hastings. 

“I am not living in a city,” Dean said resolutely. 

The agent did not comment on the fact that Dean considered a town of 25,000 people a city. 

“What about here?” She pulled up a listing for a small house on the outskirts of town. It was one story and had a small but neat front yard. The second picture on the listing showed the street, a row of houses that all looked pretty damn similar. 

“No.”

This was how Dean ended up driving his exhausted, exasperated real estate agent on a creaky back road out to a property that seemed to be her last resort. Her name was Susanna, and she was in her early 30s. Young, but everything about her suggested professionalism and that she had every aspect of her life under control. Except, apparently, this driveway.

“The main attraction here is the property,” she said, subtly holding onto the door for support when Dean hit a particularly large pothole. “Forty acres, all untouched. Used to be a farm, years ago, but the family fell on some hard times.”

Dean nodded vacantly. Sure. Whatever. He’d been on so many of these goddamn trips that he was, if possible, even more done with it than his agent was done with him. Usually, Sam and Eileen had tagged along, but they were back in Des Moines this week, celebrating some friend of theirs’ birthday. How Sammy had made friends that fast, Dean had no idea. 

When they pulled up at the house, Dean got why that wasn’t the main attraction. It looked like it had been nice, once. But it certainly wasn’t anymore - the paint was peeling, a window was broken, and the boards on the porch were warped. 

“How long ago did you say they moved out?”

Susanna tapped her perfectly manicured nails against her slacks. “Fifteen years ago.”

Dean gave the house a once-over. It didn’t look like it was falling apart per se, it was just… old. And he had lived in the men of letters bunker for years. He knew old. 

“So are we gonna go inside?”

Her eyebrows lifted what would have been an imperceptible amount if Dean hadn’t spent his life reading people. She had been expecting him to take one look at this place, he realized, and drive away. But weirdly, this was the first place they’d looked at that he actually wanted to see.

“Okay.”

“So it’s three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms,” Susanna said as they stepped onto the porch. “There’s a barn over that way-” she pointed, and Dean thought he could see another ramshackle building a good ways away, “but a storm hit it hard a few years ago, so it’s not in the best shape.”

She opened the front door, the hinges creaking in a way that made Dean want to grab some WD-40 out of his trunk, and stepped inside. 

Dean bought the house on the spot. It would take some work, but it was nice, in its own way. Everything about it was just a little bit broken, and Dean thought that’s maybe why he liked it, because he was a little bit broken too. 

Susanna did a good job of concealing her shock when Dean asked her how much the property was going for, but she didn’t manage to stop her eyebrows from jumping up when he said “I’ll take it.” 

So here he was, owner of a creaky old house and forty empty acres, and maybe it wasn’t a future like Sam had, but it was something.

“You did WHAT?” Sam asked when Dean called.

Dean stood on the porch of his new house, splinters stabbing his feet through his socks, and looked out at the darkening fields. “I bought a farm.”

“Like, with crops and stuff? Do you have to milk cows or something now?”

Dean chuckled. “Nah, Sammy, it’s not a real farm anymore. Just a house in the middle of nowhere.”

Dean can’t see Sam over the phone, but he can practically hear him narrowing his eyes. “We already had a house in the middle of nowhere. The point of you moving out was to interact with people.” 

“I interacted with my realtor.”

“That is not what I meant and you know it.” 

“Yeah, I do.” Dean drummed his fingers on the porch railing absently. He was going to have to stain and seal this before it got any more water damaged. “But it’s… it’s good, Sam.”

“Eileen and I are coming to visit.” 

“You are not going to drive three states over just to check on me. I’m fine. Really.” It surprised Dean that for once, he wasn’t lying. He didn’t know what to do with himself anymore, but this was a start. Almost everyone he had lost was back - and if he had asked Jack a time or four to bring Cas back too, nobody needed to know - and he was doing closer to good than he had been in a very long time. 

“Can’t I visit my own brother, no ulterior motive necessary?” Sam was kidding. 

“Sure you can. Just not yet. Gotta get this place fixed up first.”

Dean had been on the end of Sam’s disappointed sigh far too many times, and he almost laughed when he heard it this time. “You bought a fixer-upper?” Sam sounded disbelieving, and Dean didn’t know why. This was the best decision he’d made in a while. 

“I sure did,” he said with a smile. 

It did turn out to be a good decision. Fixing the house came with the manual labor and long hours of hunting, but without the danger and the shitty motels. Dean ordered a mattress online, something he felt absolutely no qualms about using the fake credit cards for, and sat it down in a second-floor bedroom. He would get a bed frame eventually, but for now, it didn’t seem like the most important thing. What was important shifted from day to day - getting the gas for the stove replaced so he could cook, bringing a repairman out to make sure the furnace wasn’t going to kill him when he turned it on for the winter. Installing a new window he bought, and then installing it again when he realized he had accidentally put the latches on the outside. 

He was alone, but it wasn’t lonely. There was an easy feeling of getting lost in hard work that he hadn’t been able to get on a solo hunt. Hunting was all about knowing the monster’s every move, trusting someone to watch your back. Sanding the splinters out of the porch was about buying an electric sander and spending two days in the sun on his hands and knees smoothing out the rough patches. The only thing he’d killed since moving in was a snake that had thought slithering under the front door was a good idea. 

Still, sometimes it got to be too much.

About two weeks into his stay, he was climbing down from the roof after locating the leak that had forced him to keep several buckets in the attic. It hit him, as he stepped off the ladder, that there was no one there to hold it. Not that he would have let Sam steady the ladder for him if he was there, because it was set up pretty firmly. But the fact that there was nobody, that he hadn’t seen anyone except for store employees in two weeks, made everything feel like it was crashing down around him. 

He called Sam.

“You and Eileen can come out now, if you still want to,” Dean said when Sam picked up. 

“Course we do.” Sam stopped talking for a moment, presumably having a conversation with Eileen. “Next Wednesday okay?”

“Yeah.”

Dean sat there in his yard, not saying anything, but unwilling to hang up the phone.

“Hey, are you okay?” Sam asked after a moment.

“Are you?”

That wasn’t an attempt to evade the question. Neither of them were okay. They couldn’t be, after what they’d been through. But they were each trying, in their own way. 

“That’s different,” Sam said softly. “I got Eileen back. You didn’t get Cas.”

Dean sighed. He was done telling Sam what him and Cas weren’t, or hadn’t been. Cas was dead, and there was apparently nothing even God could do about it, so it didn’t matter much anyway. 

“It’s not just Cas.” A lot of it was, though. “I just don’t think I know how to start over.” 

“It seems like you’re doing a pretty good job of it.” 

Sam didn’t say what both of them are thinking, that Dean fixing up a farm was a much better way to cope than the grief-fueled benders and angry hunts he’d gone on the last several times Cas had died. 

“One of these days I’ll run out of shit to do here. And I don’t know what I’m going to do next.” 

“Life isn’t just a series of jobs, Dean,” Sam said. “That’s what we did before.”

“What, are you gonna tell me to live in the moment or some shit?”

“Do I have to?”

Dean paused. “No, I guess you don’t.” 

“Good.” There was a loud clanging from Sam’s end, like he’d dropped a pan on the floor. “Shit. I’ll see you Wednesday.”

On Monday, Dean finished fixing the hole in the roof. On Tuesday, he drove into town and bought groceries, including vegetables because he knew Sam would give him hell for pretty much only eating breakfast foods and burgers at every meal. On Wednesday, he realized he didn’t have a mattress or a bed frame in either of the spare rooms and ended up driving all the way up to Hastings, strapping a mattress on the roof of the Impala, and hightailing it back before the clouds could ruin his brand-new purchase. He barely managed to get everything set up before they arrived.

“So,” Sam said, stepping out of his (small, hybrid) car. “This is the place.” 

Dean, who had seen them coming down the long driveway and waited on the porch, nodded. “Home sweet home.”

Dean hadn’t gotten around to painting the outside of the house yet (or, for that matter, the inside), so the faded, peeling paint that had been on there when he bought it was still there. Looking at it from the driveway, it didn’t look like much. Still falling apart a little, but now the porch wouldn’t give anybody splinters. It was, in his book, a success. 

Then Sam hugged Dean, and he hadn’t seen that coming at all, and afterwards he said “I’m happy for you.” 

“Yeah, yeah. You too.” Dean didn’t think at all about how he hasn’t touched someone since the last time Sam hugged him goodbye. Because he wasn’t lonely. 

And then Eileen got out of the car, and she signed “If your house falls down on me, I’ll kill you,” and hugged him, and it had only been a few weeks but Dean had missed them so much. 

They only stayed a few days. Dean hadn’t expected them to stay that long, really, but he was glad they did. He made Sam mow his yard, or what he was accepting as the ‘yard’ part, and not the general ‘unused field’ part. Eileen bullied him into keeping a good supply of food in his fridge and helped Dean re-screen the door to the porch. It was good. This was what he’d been missing - having people around, seeing his brother. 

“Are you doing anything with the barn?” Eileen asked him on their last day. The two of them had walked out across the field to take a look at it, and aside from being way too full of spiders to be normal and being generally abandoned, it wasn’t as bad as Dean had thought.

He’d been avoiding it, given that him and Cas met in a barn and he hadn’t been in one since and Cas was dead, but Eileen had asked him to walk out here and it seemed stupid to avoid a part of his own property anyway.

“What the hell am I going to do with a barn?” He didn’t quite have the hang of sign language yet, but he tried to sign as he spoke. He needed to get an internet connection out here so he could keep learning it for the next time she came to visit. 

She shrugged. “You live on a farm, dumbass.” 

Dean did not do anything with the barn. What he did do was spend an exorbitant amount of time haggling to get an internet connection in what was admittedly the middle of nowhere and, when that finally went through, use his spotty internet connection to learn everything he could learn about raising chickens. 

Back when he first started hunting, Dean had hated research. That had always been Sam’s thing, and Dean had mocked him mercilessly about it. But over the years, he’d gotten pretty good at it. Good enough that, after several days of research, Dean was fairly confident he knew how to raise chickens. 

Building the coop wasn’t hard. What he gathered was that chickens can live in pretty much anything (he had seen pictures of some crazy-looking coops on the internet), but he’d never cared about aesthetics much. So a few days later, Dean ended up with what was practically a miniature house in his backyard, complete with a large fenced-in outdoor area, all decked out for chickens to live in. Looking out at it from the porch, he laughed - Sammy might have a doghouse in his suburban backyard one day. Dean had a chicken house. 

Raising the birds wasn’t all that hard, either. Aside from birdseed and water, they pretty much took care of themselves. Yeah, he had to collect eggs every day, and shovel manure, but it wasn’t that much work. After literally fighting God, nothing really was. 

He still didn’t see people often, with pretty much all of his human interaction coming via phone calls with Sam or brief conversations with the grocery and hardware store cashiers in town. And though raising animals wasn’t a perfect substitute, it was pretty damn good. There was no way he could just lie in bed on a bad day, he had to get outside and take care of them. And the way they swarmed out of the coop to the edge of their private yard when they saw him coming? Sure, maybe it was just because he held the feed bucket, but it warmed something inside his chest anyway. 

One day in August, Dean was taking a walk around the edge of his property. He’d just gotten off a Skype call with Sam and Eileen - they were going to Jody’s for Thanksgiving, and apparently he was too. Dean thought it was crazy to be thinking that far ahead, but then he remembered that there wasn’t really much chance any of them would die or be swept up in another apocalypse in the next three months anymore, so maybe planning ahead was okay so long as Sam did it and he didn’t have to. 

It was a hot day, but not humid. This was the kind of day Dean loved - bright and sunny, a beautiful Kansas summertime. There was a small pond on his left, just big enough to fit in this vast landscape. He hadn’t noticed it before.

“Hey, Jack,” he said. The field around him was quiet, and Dean knew absolutely nothing lurked in the woods a few hundred yards off. Everything was still.

“We’re going to Jody’s for Thanksgiving. Me and Sam and everybody.” Everybody really did mean everybody - from how it sounded, Jody was going to have her hands full. “I know you’re busy being God and all, but if you can come… You’re still a part of this family. We still want to see you.”

Dean waited for a moment. Jack didn’t appear and neither did any random wildlife, but a warm breeze blew for a few seconds before settling back into the still air, and Dean thought that was probably as much of a sign as he was going to get. 

“I hope you’re doing good, kid. We miss you down here.”

He didn’t have a rooster, so the chickens didn’t wake him up at the crack of dawn, but Dean still rolled out of bed before 8 most days. He had the time to sleep in, but decades of sleeping whenever he could catch a few hours mean that he still had trouble sleeping for his full eight hours. Every day was pretty much the same - he got up, made himself coffee and put a disgusting amount of sugar in it, and drank it out on his porch. He marveled at that, that he had a porch he could drink coffee on like a normal person and not somebody who had died more times than he could remember and been possessed and who knows what else. 

The sun was up, so before the day could truly get hot, he would head out to the chicken coop to collect the eggs. Dean had a grand total of five chickens, and four of them were absolute angels, even if they did shit everywhere. (Better than angels, really, because the only angel who wasn’t an absolute dick was fucking dead.) The fifth… well, Dean had named her Bastard for a reason. She seemed to make it her mission to trip Dean up when he came in to clean up, standing just in front of him and refusing to move. The crazy thing was that he didn’t mind. Bastard would go about her business of messing up his day and he would just shake his head and work around her.

He’d even realized that Sammy hadn’t been overselling the health foods thing - these eggs were miles above the ones from the grocery store, though he couldn’t be sure that wasn’t just an effect of him appreciating his own hard work. 

Like he’d thought, Dean did eventually run out of things to fix on the house. It took him a while, and the barn was still ramshackle at best, but he did it. And he still didn’t know where to go from there. 

So he did what anyone would do - dove back into research. This time, on goats. Because what the hell. 

Six weeks later, a large amount of land behind Dean’s house had been converted to a goat enclosure, fenced in and with a sturdy little hut. There was even an illegitimately-sourced monster truck tire for them to climb on. 

Dean was getting to know the farm supply store people a little better than he would like, given the frequency of his trips there, and he even (tragically) had to drive a car that wasn’t the Impala. It was, instead, an absolutely ancient pickup truck of indeterminate brand that, before he’d had a long weekend to work on it, belched black smoke like it was a Victorian factory. But the pickup had what the Impala did not, a tow hitch, and so Dean found himself one early October day with the windows down and a trailer with four goats in it hooked onto the back. 

He let the goats out in their enclosure and leaned against the fence, watching them walk around and carefully kick or headbut every individual part of the fence, hut, and tire. This was really damn weird. He’d told Sam he didn’t have a farm, just a house, when he moved in. He was pretty sure this counted as a farm now. He had never been more at peace. 

The goats were a handful. He’d known they would be, but damn. One, a brown thing with scruffy white patches around her eyes, he named Patience because of how severely she tested his. (This was not a comment on the human Patience, who he didn’t really know but thought was a pretty good kid.) Only four days after he’d brought them home, Patience figured out how to open the lock on the fence gate from the inside, a fact which he only found out after she joined him in the kitchen while he was making lunch. He wasn’t proud to say he’d almost jumped out of his skin. 

The others weren’t so bad. Dean even thought that the gangly black one he’d named Bebe might have talked to Jack at some point, because one morning near the end of the month, when the landscape looked barren and cold instead of vibrant and alive, had lain her head on his knee when he sat down heavily on the monster truck tire. 

Bebe looked at him with huge eyes, and Dean felt like they saw right through him.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. I just miss everyone, that’s all.” He scratched her head.

Everyone was alive. He was going to see everyone in a month. But not Cas, because it had been six months and yeah, Cas had been dead for longer than this before, but not when God was dead. 

She kept staring at him, slowly nudging her head into the side of his leg. 

“Thanks.” 

She nodded as if to say “You’re welcome” and promptly began eating the alfalfa he’d left for her an hour or so ago. 

On the first day of November, Dean woke up, as usual, to the sun just starting to shine into his bedroom window. It hit the wall above his head since he still hadn’t bought a bed frame, and he squinted out the window. 

Dean took his sugar-filled coffee out to the porch and promptly dropped the mug. It shattered on the ground, splashing hot coffee over his socked feet. Because there was Cas, standing in the door to the goat enclosure, looking very much alive.

“Dean?” Cas said. “She is chewing on my coat.” 

Dean slowly looked down and to Cas’s left, where Patience stood, the tie to his trench coat firmly in her mouth. 

“You’re dead,” Dean said. 

Cas tilted his head to the side in the way he always did when he was confused. “I don’t feel dead,” he said. 

“I watched you die,” Dean said, slowly walking toward Cas. His socks were already soaked from the coffee, and now they were cold from the dew on the grass. “And now you’re standing here like nothing’s happened, letting my goats out.” 

The goats were indeed out. Bebe was still sleeping in the hut, and Patience was engrossed by trying to eat Cas’s coat, but Adam (who was a girl goat, but seeing as his brother Adam had chosen to work in Heaven with Michael and hadn’t even called, he didn’t think he’d mind) and Bobby (Bobby hadn’t come out to meet the goat who had taken his name yet, but Dean had introduced them on Skype, and the goat had immediately tried to headbut Bobby through the screen, so he figured that was good enough) had made it halfway across the yard. Adam had lingered by the chickens and seemed to be in a staring contest with Bastard through the fence. 

“Sorry,” Cas said. 

“What the hell are you apologizing for?” 

“I let your goats out.” 

“You fucking died for me, you think I care that you let my goats out?”

“You might.” 

Dean absolutely could not deal with this right now. Not with Bobby hightailing it really fucking far away, and not with Cas standing right in front of him, looking for all the world like he really didn’t know if Dean wanted him there. 

“You,” Dean said, marching forward and tugging the coat out of Patience’s mouth, “are going back in there.” With some difficulty, he pushed the gate closed. “You,” he said to Cas, “are coming with me.” 

The Empty had taken Cas from right in front of him, and Dean didn’t think he could take it if he turned around and Cas was gone again. He also couldn’t let his goats run rampant. So he grabbed ahold of Cas’s arm (not his hand, he very intentionally did not hold his hand) and practically dragged him across the field after Bobby the goat. 

“This might be easier if you let me help,” Cas said.

Dean disagreed. There was no way in which him letting go of Cas’s arm would make things easier, even if, practically speaking, it would probably help him get the goats back inside faster.

“Can’t you just magic them in there or something?”

Cas didn’t say anything, so Dean kept his hold on Cas’s wrist with one arm and successfully, albeit roundaboutly, herded Adam away from Bastard. 

“D’you want coffee? Or water or something?” 

They were back inside, goats successfully rounded up, and Dean couldn’t take his eyes off Cass, couldn’t believe even with his hand still on his wrist that he was really there.

“I’m not going to disappear the second you look away,” Cas said instead.

“No,” Dean agreed. “Last time you disappeared while I was looking right at you.”

“That -” Cas started to say something, no doubt about how that was his duty, his deal, whatever. Dean cut him off.

“It’s not gonna happen again.” 

They stood there for a moment, Dean still in his wet socks, in the kitchen. The tile floor was cold. 

“Dean, you can let go of me,” Cas said. It wasn’t a request.

“Oh.” Dean dropped his arm. “Sorry.” 

Cas retreated to the table, a small but sturdy thing Dean had bought from a neighbor. The chair squeaked as he sat down. Dean didn’t move. 

“How are you alive?”

Cas shifted in his seat. “The Empty… it’s complex, and very, very specific. It’s only for angels and demons.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “And you’re an angel.” 

“Not anymore.”

“What the hell do you mean, not anymore?” 

“I thought I was going to be in the Empty forever, Dean. And I was okay with that.” 

Dean remembered. He could still see Cas’s face like it was yesterday, tears running down his cheeks and that fucking smile being obscured by the black goo. Even with Cas sitting right in front of him, it still made him so goddamn angry. 

“And then Jack came. We found a way out, and I had to take it. And it was hardly even a sacrifice, knowing I’d get to live again.” 

“Cas, what did you do.” If he made a deal with another cosmic entity, Dean would kill him. No, he wouldn’t. He only just got Cas back. But he would be mad as all hell, that’s for damn sure.

Cas smiled lopsidedly. “Jack took my grace. And once I was human, the Empty spit me back out.” 

“In my backyard.” 

“Jack had something to do with that, I think,” Cas said. “I can go, if you want.” 

_ Thank God for that kid _ , Dean briefly thought, and then he remembered that aside from Jack, there wasn’t a God to thank. He still couldn’t get used to that.

“Don’t.” He said it too quickly, and it took Cas by surprise and Dean saw his eyes widen. “I mean, stay. If you want to.”

“Are you sure? Before… Before I died, you seemed…” 

Dean didn’t know what words Cas had meant to finish that sentence. Shocked? Definitely. Taken aback? Yeah. But offended? Disgusted? No way. 

“You were dying, Cas, it’s not like I had much time to react.” 

“So you’re not mad?”

“What the hell would I be mad for?” Dean had known many people who would be mad if their best friend of the same gender (Did Cas count as the same gender as him? Did wavelengths of celestial intent even have genders?) seemingly out of the blue confessed their undying love. His father certainly would not have taken it well. But he wasn’t his father, and he hadn’t been mad. But he didn’t know what to think about it, and it hadn’t seemed like something he needed to think about when Cas was dead. (He’d tried, once, and ended up sobbing in the corner of the bunker’s library.) So he hadn’t, and now Cas was back and he’d had six months to think about it and he still didn’t have an answer. 

Cas made a hand-wavy gesture that implied that Dean knew very well what he meant. 

“Look, I’m not mad,” Dean said. “I just… I didn’t know what to think. And I still don’t.” 

“That’s okay. You don’t have to think anything different. It was the only way to save you, so I don’t regret it.”

It was, Dean decided, way too early for this. 

“Okay.” He waited a moment. “If you’re human now, do you have a place to stay?”

Cas shrugged. “I’ve only been human for a few hours. I’m sure I’ll find one.” 

“It’s a big house.” Dean tucked his hands into his pockets, mostly as something to do with the nervous energy that had suddenly filled him. “You could stay here, if you want.” 

The smile on Cas’s face was so bright that he never wanted to look away. “I’d like that.”

Dean put Cas up in the spare room Sam had stayed in and went outside to tend to the chickens. Every few seconds, he was hit with the incredible temptation to run back inside and check if Cas was still back, but he resisted. He would be there, he knew he would be. And this chore needed to be done. 

When he came back in an hour later, smelling of chicken manure and carrying five eggs, Cas was sitting in his same chair at the table. 

“I’m not going anywhere, Dean,” he said with a soft smile. 

“Do you want lunch?” Dean asked, holding up the eggs. 

“This tastes a lot different as a human,” Cas said after his first bite of the omelet Dean had made him. “Better.” 

Dean made a ‘hm?’ noise as he cooked his own eggs. 

“Before, food just tasted like molecules. I remember eating when I was human before, years ago, but it wasn’t anything like this.” Cas poked at his food with a fork. “I can taste the eggs, and the cheese, and it’s all different.” 

“Good different?” 

Cas nodded and took another bite. “Does food always taste like this?”

Dean shrugged. “Sometimes.” 

“Thank you,” Dean said to the empty sky later that afternoon. He knew Jack probably hadn’t done this for him, that Jack had been - was? - far closer to Cas than he had been to Dean, but it still felt like a miracle. “Just - thank you.” 

The next morning, Dean stumbled downstairs for his coffee like he did every day. He didn’t make it to the kitchen. Cas sat, trench coat laid over himself like a blanket, on Dean’s couch.

“You’re up early.” 

Cas didn’t look at Dean. His gaze was fixed on some point in the distance Dean couldn’t see. “I didn’t sleep.”

Cas had never slept when he was an angel. But- “If you’re human now, don’t you need to sleep?”

He shrugged. 

This was nothing short of concerning, so Dean trudged over to the couch and sat down beside Cas, carefully leaving a few inches of space between them. “What’s going on?” he asked softly. 

Then, Cas did turn to look at Dean. His eyes were haunted. “The Empty… all it is is sleep. Eternal sleep.”

This explained very little, but Cas seemed to think it explained a lot, so Dean said “Okay.”

“I’m afraid if I go to sleep, I won’t wake up.”

The way he said that was Cas all over. Blunt truths said without hesitation. But Cas was human now. Dean could see the fear in his eyes. 

“I’m not gonna let that happen.” 

“As though you would be able to stop it.” 

Maybe he couldn’t, but Dean would fight to his last breath before he let the Empty take Cas away from him again. 

“You said you’re human now, right? So it can’t take you anymore. You’re safe.”

Cas sat quietly for a moment. “I spent so long dreaming there. I don’t want this to be just like another dream.” 

Dean took Cas’s hand from where it had been clenched in the trench coat and threaded his fingers through it. “You’re here,” he said, squeezing Cas’s hand. “This is real. It can’t get you anymore.”

“Thank you,” Cas said. He looked exhausted. 

Maybe he should call Sam, Dean thought as he was changing the goats’ bedding the next day. Cas had been back for two days, and he was Sam’s friend too. Sam deserved to know.

Cas had followed Dean outside, and Patience had resumed her attempt to eat his coat. Dean shook his head with a smile as he walked past, pushing the wheelbarrow of dirty hay out of the enclosure. 

Returning from the compost heap with an empty wheelbarrow, Dean paused just inside the gate to the enclosure. Cas sat on the edge of the tire, Patience on the ground before him. He was tugging his coat tie out of her mouth, telling her very seriously “You know you’re not supposed to eat that.” The seriousness was somewhat offset by Bobby the goat standing behind him on the tire and licking his ear. 

Dean smiled at the sight. He could call Sam tomorrow.

Cas adjusted pretty well to being human. It had been a few years since he’d been human the first time, so Dean hadn’t been sure (and then, he’d been living in the storeroom of a Gas N Sip, which wasn’t exactly model human behavior), but he was doing okay. 

Dean did eventually give in and call Sam. Eventually.

“You sound happy,” Sam said.

Dean raised an eyebrow, though Sam couldn’t see it. “All I said was hello.” He stood on his front porch, tapping on the railing that, after his careful work, wouldn’t give him splinters anymore, and looked out at the world. 

“So you’re telling me you aren’t happy?”

“You shoulda been a lawyer after all, Sammy,” Dean chuckled.

“I  _ have _ been thinking about going back to school,” Sam said, like that wasn’t a huge bomb to drop. “I still might be.”

“That’s great, Sammy. That’s really great.” 

“So what’s got you so busy you couldn’t call for two weeks?”

Dean winced. It’s not that he had been purposely avoiding calling Sam, and there was no way he could frame ‘I wanted to have Cas to myself’ in a way that wasn’t super selfish.

But he had to say something, so he said “Cas is back,” as though that wasn’t a much bigger revelation than Sam’s had been. 

“What? Really? That’s awesome.” Sam paused for a moment. “How?”

“I dunno. But he’s - he’s human now. Jack did something, and now…”

“He’s back.” 

“Yeah.” Dean was very grateful Sam didn’t choose to mock him for how ridiculously happy he sounded. Because he was really fucking happy, for the first time in a while. 

“So is he coming to Thanksgiving? Or do I have to drive to you to see him?”

“He’ll be at Thanksgiving, don’t worry.”

“I’ll be where?” Cas called from inside. 

“We’re going to Jody’s for Thanksgiving,” Dean called back, holding the phone away from him so he didn’t blast Sam’s ears. “And don’t eavesdrop on me.”

“He’s there?” Sam asked. 

“Yeah, he, uh, he’s been living with me.” 

Dean can practically hear the suspicious eyebrow raise in Sam’s voice when he says “He’s been? How long has he been back?” 

“Um. Two weeks.” 

“Shit, man.” There’s a smile in Sam’s voice, and Dean’s just glad he isn’t mad about being kept in the dark. “Can I talk to him?”

Dean held the phone away from him again. “Sam wants to talk to you!” he called. 

Cas couldn’t teleport anymore, but it still seemed like he appeared out of nowhere sometimes. This was not one of those times - Dean was treated to the sight of Cas, clutching a cup of coffee like it was a lifeline (once he had started sleeping, he slept in much later than Dean) shuffling out to the porch. He’d given up on wearing a suit everywhere, as it just wasn’t practical out here, but there wasn’t anywhere to shop either, so he’d ended up in Dean’s flannels and jeans as they waited for his Amazon purchases to arrive. Right now, though, he wore the singular pair of fuzzy pajama pants Dean owned, and something in Dean’s chest felt strangely warm at the sight. 

Wordlessly, he held out his hand for the phone, and Dean gave it to him, retreating inside. 

“Hello, Sam,” he heard as he pulled the door closed behind him. 

“Sam seems happy,” Cas said when he gave Dean his phone back. 

“I think he is. Him and Eileen, they’ve got a good thing.” 

Cas tilted his head to the side. “Are you happy, Dean?”

Dean smiled with one corner of his mouth. “Yeah, Cas. I am.” 

“That’s good.” 

He walked away, and Dean wondered what that had been about. 

It wasn’t long before Dean was throwing a bag into the trunk of the Impala - the first bag he’d packed since moving in, and there was something about that stability that made him both happy and nostalgic. It wasn’t that far up to Jody’s, not compared to the distances he and Sam used to drive for hunts, but it was still far enough to eat up most of a day. 

Cas dropped his bag in the trunk next to Dean’s. His clothes had finally arrived a few days ago (shipping speeds were, apparently, really fucking slow living where he did), so he had exchanged the borrowed flannels for button-ups. Dean had been trying to convince him to at least roll up the sleeves - “You’re not working in an  _ office _ , Cas” - but so far, he hadn’t succeeded. 

“Are you sure Jody wants me to come?”

Dean scoffed. “Sure she does.”

“She didn’t know me that well, before.” 

This was a fair point. Jody was also, however, a very nice person who wouldn’t want Cas to stay by himself on Thanksgiving, which was what she’d told Dean when he’d called her a few days ago and asked if Cas could come too, since he was alive again. 

“Then you can get to know her now.” Dean closed the trunk. “C’mon.” 

Driving was different, after, too. This wasn’t like when he had driven out for that one solitary hunt he’d done before hanging up his hat either. The road was still endless in front of him, but he wasn’t going to a shitty motel room and a quick salt and burn. It didn’t feel like it would swallow him whole, like he could keep driving forever. 

This drive was happier, the knowledge of the family he was driving to and the fact that he wasn’t alone in the car making the time fly. He turned up the classic rock station and just drove. 

“I know this one,” Cas said about an hour into the drive. The radio had just started up a Led Zeppelin song, one of the ones Dean had put on that mixtape he’d given Cas a couple years ago. 

“It’s a good song.” 

Cas nodded and continued staring out the window. 

“It’s beautiful,” Cas said, a long time later.

“What is?”

Outside the car was much the same scenery as had been there all day - endless fields and scruffy forests occasionally punctuated by a power line. 

“Everything.”

Jody greeted him with a hug that evening when he finally rolled up to her place. 

“It’s been too long,” she said. 

“You didn’t come see me either,” Dean pointed out. “And do you know how hard it is to find someone willing to watch chickens for the weekend?”

Jody raised one eyebrow. 

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll call more.” 

“That’s what I thought,” she said with a smile.

Cas climbed out of the car, standing awkwardly in the driveway. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello yourself.” 

Jody walked around the car to hug him, which Cas clearly hadn’t been expecting, since it took him quite a while to hug her back. 

“Dean says you’re human now,” Jody said when she pulled away. 

“Yes.” 

“How d’you like it?”

Cas tilted his head to the side. “It’s nice,” he said eventually. “Strange.”

Dean grabbed their bags out of the trunk and Jody led them inside.

“You’re the last to arrive,” she said, “so you’ve got last pick of bedrooms. We’ve got Alex on the floor in Claire’s room, and Kaia’s in there too, and Charlie and Stevie are in Alex’s room, and Sam and Eileen got the spare. Which means you two get the couch.” 

Dean looked at Jody incredulously. He might not be the tallest guy, but that didn’t mean that both him and Cas could sleep on one couch. 

“It’s a pull-out bed,” Jody said. 

Dean glanced at Cas, who shrugged. 

“Sounds great,” he said. “Thanks.” 

“Cas?” Dean asked that night, lying on the pull-out couch bed and staring determinedly at the ceiling. He and Cas were close enough that if either of them reached out at all, they would be touching. Neither did.

“Yes, Dean?”

“I’m glad you’re here.” 

Dean didn’t take his eyes off the ceiling, because expressing any form of genuine emotion was way easier when he didn’t have to look at the person he was talking to. 

“Here on this couch, or here as in on earth?” Cas asked. This was the sort of thing Cas did, ask questions that no one else would think or care to ask. 

Dean very much wanted to hug Cas. But they were in bed (the same bed, and why wasn’t that weird), so that wouldn’t be a hug but would be cuddling, and Cas was  _ in love with him- _

“Yeah,” he said. 

He still didn’t look, but he could hear the warmth in Cas’s voice when he said “Me too.” 

After six months of interacting with pretty much nobody, being in a house with so many people was… difficult. Dean loved them all, he really did, but there was always someone in every room all the time. He could ignore that, though, at the dinner table, when everyone was talking across the table to everyone else and he got to stuff himself with as much food as he could fit on his plate. 

“This is a very strange holiday,” Cas said at the beginning of the meal. He was seated between Dean and Claire, who had nearly started crying when she saw him. “Are you aware of its origins?”

Dean waited until he no longer had an exorbitant amount of mashed potatoes in his mouth to say “Yeah. And we ain’t celebrating that. This is just about family.”

Cas nodded. “That part of it is very nice.” 

Jack popped in while they were clearing the plates. He couldn’t stay long, he said, but he gave everyone a hug and he even had a slice of pie before blinking away to do whatever God did whenever he wasn’t interfering with the course of the universe. It was a testament to how weird their lives were that God himself could just pop in, but hey, he was a part of the family too. And besides, he wasn’t there as God - he was just Jack, an awkward kid who, despite everything, saw the best in the world.

Sam cornered him after dinner. Dean was stuffed, eyeing the apple pie and considering whether he could eat another slice while still being able to walk, when Sam walked into the kitchen to grab a beer. Instead of leaving, though, he leaned against the counter and looked pointedly at Dean.

“So, you and Cas, then,” he said, popping the top off his bottle. 

“What do you mean, me and Cas?” Dean decided he couldn’t have another slice of pie yet - maybe later - but he could have a beer. “You wanna pass me one of those?”

Sam reached back into the fridge and grabbed another beer. “He lives with you.” 

“I got a big house.” 

“And that’s all it is?”

Dean grabbed the beer from Sam and narrowed his eyes. “Sammy, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Alex asked me if you two had gotten married.” 

And, well. Of all the things that could have come out of Sam’s mouth, Dean thought that was the one he was the least prepared for. 

“No, we haven’t gotten married,” he said as though this was obvious. And it was. Sure, they lived together, and Cas had once confessed to being in love with Dean, but they hadn’t talked about that and they weren’t even together. 

“I know that,” Sam scoffs. “If you had, I would have been invited.”

“Then why’d you ask me?”

“I’m just saying. If you were together…” Sam shrugged. “It wouldn’t be a big deal. I’d be happy for you.”

Maybe, Dean thought, it was time to quit bullshitting himself. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t form the words, so they just stood there for nearly a minute until Sam turned to leave. 

“He told me he loved me,” Dean said, and he was pretty sure the only reason he was able to say it is because Sam’s back was turned. “Before he died.” 

Then Sam turned back to him, and Dean’s ability to speak vanished once more. 

“He did?” 

Dean nodded.

“Okay.” This was the kind of ‘okay’ Sam said when he was working out what to say next, and Dean did not want him to keep talking.

“We haven’t talked about it.” 

Sam raised his eyebrows. “He’s been living with you for a month and you haven’t talked about it.”

“Uh. Yeah.” Dean was well aware he should have talked to Cas about it, but he just couldn’t. It wasn’t something he wanted to bring up, not when he didn’t know how Cas meant it (he was pretty damn sure) or whether he still felt that way (it hadn’t been that long) or how he felt about it. 

“Are you going to?”

Dean had, in fact, been planning on never having that conversation. This was not the correct thing to tell Sam. 

But Sam figured it out from the look on Dean’s face, because he said “And why not?” like he was waiting for Dean to draw some kind of conclusion from this conversation.

“It’s really easy like this,” he said quietly. “I don’t want anything to change.” 

“Not even if it’s a change for the better?”

Dean shrugged. 

“Okay,” Sam said, and that was the kind of ‘okay’ that meant he was done with the conversation, which Dean couldn’t have been happier about. “D’you want to see if Claire is good enough to beat you at poker now?”

“Sure.”

Dean followed Sam out of the kitchen, back to the insanely crowded living room, where Charlie had insisted on having the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special playing, even though she didn’t seem to be watching it, instead having been caught up in the hubbub that was most of America’s best hunters coming together for the holiday. 

The next morning, Dean woke up on the pull-out couch stiff from the springs poking his back. There was something warm on his right side, and he opened his eyes to see that Cas had curled into a small ball while asleep and somehow ended up with his back pressed against Dean’s side. Dean raised an eyebrow and closed his eyes again. It wasn’t early enough to be awake. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to wait and post this as a one-shot but I am impatient and was encouraged to do this. When school lets up (soon) I will write the second half. I can be encouraged to pass over schoolwork for writing via comments ;)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well. end of term, intense burnout, one 14-hour drive, and a mild depressive episode later, here we are. chapter two. the second half of farmer!dean.
> 
> *throwing my hyperspecific headcanons about Dean's relationship to his sexuality into this fic* be free
> 
> warning in this chapter for a brief description of past abuse (in reference to john winchester). if you want to skip it, skip the thrift store scene near the end

Dean and Cas headed out on Saturday. They didn’t have jobs to get back to, but Dean had his animals, and he didn’t want to overstay Jody’s welcome. 

The drive back was peaceful, and Dean thought this might be how ordinary people lived. Happily, safely, driving long distances just on the holidays. The burger he ate behind the wheel tasted the same, though, and he was glad for it. There were some things that just shouldn’t change.

“I’m going to get a job,” Cas said. The driveway was still full of potholes, but Dean navigated around them expertly. Their house - and when did Dean start to think of it as their house instead of his house? - was silhouetted against the setting sun. 

“Why?”

Cas shrugged. “It seems like the thing to do.” 

Dean had never held down a steady, non-hunting job in his life, so he wasn’t too sure about that. “If this is some kinda ‘earn your keep’ thing or whatever, you don’t have to.” 

“I know.” 

And that’s good, that’s really good, because it means Cas knows this is as much his house as it is Dean’s, and he knows that Dean doesn’t expect anything of him, but then why - 

“I want to.” 

And, well, Dean’s not going to argue with that. 

Adam the goat walked in circles around Dean when he slipped into their enclosure the next morning, and Patience headbutted his shin hard enough that he almost fell.

“Hey, guys. I know, I know.” Dean ruffled the fur on Patience’s head, and she glared at him. “I was gone.” 

The grass, stiff from the early-December frost, crunched under Dean’s feet as he walked to the hut and poked at the straw. It is clean, maybe even cleaner than he’d left it. 

“Looks like you got taken care of just fine, huh?” Bobby the goat brayed, and Dean chuckled. “So you missed me, that’s it. Noted.” 

Dean shoved his hands into his pockets to keep out of the cold and wished he’d brought a hat to keep his ears from freezing but stood in the goat enclosure until the sun had burned off the morning fog and the frost had melted onto his boots. This - the cold air around him, the sun on his face, the bustling of his animals around him - this was home. This was peace. 

“How’d it go?” Dean stood in the kitchen, not making dinner yet but thinking about it, when Cas let himself in the front door. 

“I never realized how much paperwork is necessary to exist,” Cas said in response. He hadn’t come into the kitchen, and Dean didn’t go out to the living room, but he could hear him slipping off his shoes, and sure enough, a very disgruntled Cas joined Dean in the kitchen, settling down in the one chair he’d claimed as his own on his very first day there. 

Dean nodded.

“I was asked for a birth certificate. The human race hadn’t even crossed God’s mind when I was created.” 

“I’ve got some fake ones, if you want.” 

Cas wrinkled his nose. 

“Is this how everyone lives? Handing over fake paperwork to make sandwiches for a living?”

Dean shrugged. He grabbed a glass out of the cabinet and got himself some water out of the sink. “Most people aren’t you.”

Cas didn’t say anything, but he tilted his head to the side and waited for an explanation. 

“That’s how I live, ‘cause my real name won’t get me anywhere but the inside of a jail cell, and that’s if I’m lucky. And that’s how you gotta live, ‘cause they don’t exactly make a bubble on forms for ‘fallen angels of the lord.’ Hell, it’s not like you got a social security number when Jack resurrected you.”

“What,” Cas asked, “is a social security number.” 

Dean laughed. Cas might be human, but he’d once been one of the most powerful creatures in the universe, and now he was defeated by the bureaucracy of the United States government. 

“If you get any of those spam calls, please ask them that,” Dean said, still laughing. “Poor bastards’ll never know what hit em.” 

Cas smiled, in the ‘I don’t know what’s funny but I’m glad you’re laughing’ way, and something in Dean’s chest twisted just a little bit. 

“We’ll get you a fake social, too,” he promised. 

“I have to have a last name?” 

Sam was on speakerphone, helping Cas obtain whatever fake documentation he needed to convince Smith Center, Kansas’s only diner that he was a born and raised US citizen and not a fallen angel in possession of the body of a missing Illinois tax accountant. 

“You had one last time you were human,” Dean said. He technically was not involved in the conversation, but he was there anyway, mostly for something to do. “You were Steve… whatever. Use that one again.” 

Cas narrowed his eyes at Dean. “I am building myself an identity, and it will be one I’m attached to and consider my own, not a fake name I plucked from a newspaper.” 

Sam cleared his throat awkwardly. “So Castiel or Cas for the first name?” 

Cas sighed dramatically. 

Two weeks later, a thick envelope arrived at their door. Inside, Sam had written a note: do NOT lose these. Two days after that, Castiel Winchester had a job serving the exhausted inhabitants of Smith Center their morning coffee/pie/pancakes at one of the town’s two breakfast spots.

(And if Dean’s ribcage felt too small, somehow, like his lungs and heart had expanded to fill up every molecule of his space and then some, like the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas when the Grinch’s heart grows and grows until it breaks the frame around it, when he saw the name on Cas’s fake identification, he didn’t let himself think about it.)

“I’ve never heard so many Christmas carols in my life,” Cas said when he came home from his first shift. 

Dean laughed. “‘Tis the season, right?”

Cas sat in his chair at the table, which Dean thought might be his favorite spot in the house. “We don’t have Christmas in Heaven,” he said. “It’s not important there.” 

It seemed weird to Dean that Heaven itself wouldn’t celebrate, but also he couldn’t imagine any of the angels celebrating anything. Gabriel maybe, but only by putting the mistletoe in weird places and drinking way too much eggnog. But Raphael? Michael? No way. 

“Do you want to have Christmas here?” Dean asked instead. 

“I don’t know.” Cas sat silent for a long moment. “Does that mean I need to listen to more of those songs?”

“You gotta listen to those at work tomorrow anyway.” 

“It feels wrong to celebrate God when he made you so unhappy,” Cas said, and Dean was floored. 

“He did worse to you,” Dean said quietly. “He only had me to mess with for forty years. He had you for millennia.” 

Cas shrugged, and Dean thought he didn’t do enough when they took down Chuck, that maybe Cas was right and he wasn’t made for killing but if anyone deserved it, it was Chuck just for making Cas feel that being God’s chew toy for thousands of years was something he could just shrug his shoulders and pass over. 

“It’s over now,” Cas said. “And I’m happy here.”

“Got it,” Dean said when he finally got his brain and voice working again. “No Christmas.” 

It had been a long time since Dean’s childhood. Since motels and pinching pennies to make the food last and putting everything else aside to make sure Sam was okay. They’d always done Christmas, then. It had never been much, just a gas station gift wrapped in a stolen newspaper, but it had always been worth it to see the look in Sam’s eyes. To know that he’d been able to bring a little bit of joy into their shitty lives, just for a little. 

This was the first year Dean didn’t have a Christmas. He did, a little. He called Sam, and Sam didn’t say anything about the holiday but did say he had started studying for the LSAT again. He called Jody and told her to say hi to everyone for him. 

He called Jack, standing near the woods at the edge of his yard. 

“Hey, kid.” He kicked the grass, and a chunk of ice from when it had snowed last week skidded until it hit a tree trunk. “This, uh. It’s kind of your day now, isn’t it. I dunno if you can hear me, with how many people are praying today. But I hope you’re doing good, whatever you’re doing.

“It was good to see you at Thanksgiving. You seemed… good. We miss you, you know. But I get what you said. Hands-off. But hey. Merry Christmas.”

It didn’t make much sense by the end, but that was okay. Dean was never going to adjust to Cas’s kid, his kid, being God. But Dean knew how people were, and he knew that a lot of the praying that people were going to be doing wasn’t going to be about God at all, and none of it was going to be about Jack. And sue him, he wanted Jack to know someone was thinking about him. That he was still loved, not just for what he could do, but for who he was. 

When Dean made it back inside, Cas had made French toast, which seemed to be one of the only things he could make and not burn but which he was incredibly good at. 

Cas stood just a little too close and said “Merry Christmas,” and Dean bumped his shoulder and said “You too.” 

Dean grabbed a piece of French toast right out of the pan, almost dropping it when it burned his fingers, and Cas shook his head, putting his pieces on a plate and drowning them in syrup. 

A snowstorm hit a few days later. There were snows that came down overnight, light and gentle and made the world look brand new. There were others, the ones that alternated with hail and wind and slammed the world with a frozen brutality that was only beautiful because you could see the other side. This was the third kind, where the snow fell so thick and fast it was more present than the air and where Dean could watch it overtake the grass through his window. 

Cas drove home from the diner in that snowstorm. He’d taken the truck, which had been because Dean still didn’t like people that weren’t him driving the Impala but which turned out to be a good thing because the truck had an ice scraper in the trunk instead of the hunting kit Dean still hadn’t brought himself to remove. 

Dean opened the front door as soon as he saw the truck’s headlights turn off, and as Cas hurried across the yard and the porch, coat pulled tightly around himself and snow settling heavy on his hat, Dean saw a second pair of eyes attached to a black fuzzy head poke out at Cas’s neckline. 

“Glad they sent you home when they did,” Dean said. “Another hour and you woulda been sleeping at work.” 

“Driving in the snow is very inconvenient,” Cas agreed, glancing between Dean’s face and where there was clearly a small animal visible in his coat. Dean did not acknowledge it.

“She was in the wheel well,” Cas explained once he was inside. He took off his coat, and the animal - which looked like a cat at once starved and very fat - immediately attempted to crawl up his shirt. The uniform polo might be cheaply made, but it fit reasonably well, so there wasn’t enough room between it and Cas’s bright yellow thermal undershirt for the cat to fit, and she glared at him. “I’ve heard they do that sometimes to stay warm.” 

“Mhm,” Dean said. The cat had curled up on Cas’s lap, claws out and digging into his shirt. 

“Mabel says we should take her to the vet,” Cas said. “To see if she has a chip.” The way he said this made it very clear that he had no idea what a chip was. 

If the constant Christmas music was Cas’s least favorite part of his job, Mabel was his favorite. She had worked at the diner for somewhere around sixteen years, long enough that she joked she knew the place better than even the owners. Mabel seemed to think Cas was a city boy, which Dean found hilarious, and made a point to try and help him adjust to living in rural Kansas, giving him advice on damn near everything, and Cas… well, Mabel’s six decades didn’t compare to Cas’s billions of years, but he ‘found her perspective interesting,’ as he’d put it shortly after meeting her.

“Not in this storm,” Dean said, glancing out the window. The driveway was covered by now, a uniform layer of white growing by the minute. “You’ll drive off the road before you even get to pavement.”

Cas rolled his eyes. “I know that, Dean.” 

He looked down at the cat, which was snoring loudly and had yet to release its claws from Cas’s shirt. There was something soft in his eyes when he gently ran a hand down its back, smoothing the fur that had pointed every which way after the adventure of being carried inside a winter coat. 

“If it doesn’t have a chip, it can stay here,” Dean said, quickly, before he could think about why he was saying it. 

Cas smiled at Dean, eyes crinkling around the corners in the way they only did when he was truly happy. “Thank you.” 

In his lap, the cat let out another loud snore.

The snow let up the next afternoon, leaving the yard and driveway covered in nearly a foot and a half of snow. It was already dark, so Dean didn’t shovel the driveway and Cas called out of work on the grounds that he physically couldn’t drive there. The chickens were huddled in their hut and the goats in theirs, sheltered from the snow but not going anywhere. Inside their house, it was warm. Dean made a stew because ‘it’s a soup kind of day’ and Cas attempted to make biscuits, which came out somehow both doughy and burnt but which they both ate anyway. 

Jack showed up after dinner, picking up the cat from where it had made a nest in a fleece blanket. One second he was not there, and the next he was, standing in their living room in the exact same outfit he had worn to become God. 

“Do you want to watch Star Wars?” Jack said. 

Dean didn’t, particularly, as he and Cas were on Phantom Menace and he did not want to sit through that, but he also missed Jack fiercely, so he nodded. 

Jack hugged Cas and gave Dean a fist bump, then sat down on their couch, feet on the cushion and the cat settled in his lap. 

“It’s been a long time,” Cas said. “How are you?” 

Jack tipped his head to the side in a way that was so Cas there could never be any doubt as to who raised him. “Good,” he said. “I’m everything. Literally.” 

“You’re not here to spring anything on us, right?” Dean said. “‘Cause I’m glad to see you, of course I am, but… visits from God ain’t exactly been good things in the past.” 

“I am here to visit,” Jack said, ruffling the cat’s fur and smoothing it back down. “I wanted to see you. And your cat.” 

“Oh. Good,” Dean said. “Good.” 

“So.” Jack motioned to the TV with his head, and that wasn’t something a god would do, watch bad movies in a creaky old house with his dads, even if he could turn on the TV with his mind. 

“What’s her name?” Jack asked a few minutes into the movie, petting the cat, who purred softly. 

Dean opened his mouth to say that the cat wasn’t theirs and it didn’t have a name, but Cas said “I’ve been thinking Whisper,” so Dean closed his mouth again. 

Whisper the cat let out a very loud purr and yawned, settling herself back into Jack’s lap. 

“I like it,” Jack said. He tried to pet Whisper, who flicked her tail out to bat his hand away and opened one eye to glare at him. 

Jack, it turned out, liked The Phantom Menace a lot. Cas threatened to smite Jar Jar three times over the course of the movie, and Dean was honestly surprised it wasn’t more. 

“Jar Jar Binks would not last a day on the battlefield of any war,” Cas said, and suddenly Dean remembered that Cas had been a soldier for longer than the Earth had existed, and that though Cas might be human now, that was barely a blip in his billion-year lifetime. It was just so easy to forget, with Cas sitting under the same blanket as him and wearing an awful sweater with a pattern of halos and snowflakes Sam had sent as a joke for Christmas and with Jack excitedly leaning forward to watch a movie he’d seen at least twice before with pure enthusiasm in his eyes.

“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” Dean said with a soft smile. 

“That’s why I like it,” Jack said. “I can see every battle in every war. And I see how it only causes death and destruction. But Star Wars doesn’t work like that. Jar Jar can save the day without being a soldier, and there can truly be peace in the galaxy.” 

Dean was going to say something, but before he’d even opened his mouth Jack said, without looking at him, “The continuation of the franchise doesn’t extinguish the hope in these movies.”

Cas looked over at Jack fondly, and Dean hadn’t had time, before this year, to sit down and watch a movie in ages but he was pretty sure the Star Wars universe still hadn’t achieved peace, but he didn’t mention it because Jack definitely knew better than him and was more hopeful besides. 

When Jack left after the movie ended, Whisper yowled her displeasure at having the lap she’d been sitting in so suddenly removed. “Night, Cas,” Dean said. He was halfway out of the room before he even heard Cas’s answering “Goodnight,” because he’d had the strangest impulse to kiss Cas goodnight, and that was not something he wanted to think about. 

Dean stubbornly did not think about it as he trudged through the snow the next morning to give the chickens their feed. His mind was as blank as the snow and the dim gray sky when he filled the goats’ trough and made sure they had access to non-frozen water. 

But he couldn’t avoid it forever, and shoveling the driveway clear so Cas could get to work gave him a lot of time to think. About how he very definitely was not gay, because he’d liked women since he hit puberty, but he had some undefined feelings about Cas that he wasn’t entirely sure were friendship. And there had been Lee, and Benny, and everything he got up to as a demon, even though he told himself that didn’t count since it wasn’t the kind of thing that would lead to genuine emotions. (And when it had with Benny, he’d refused to think about it and left.) And he hadn’t even made an attempt to hook up with anyone in a very long time. Since he got back from Purgatory the second time, maybe. How he lived in the same house as Cas and even though they had separate bedrooms they cooked together and ate together and sat really close together on the couch for no real reason except they wanted to. And how he hadn’t been this happy in years - maybe forever - and he knew the reason for that was the former angel that was struggling into a winter coat just inside the door. 

Dean threw salt over the driveway and watched the remainder of the snow there melt as Cas started the truck. 

“I will see you later,” Cas said somewhat awkwardly. He was always somewhat awkward, and it was always endearing.

A lazy smile spread across Dean’s face. “See ya,” he said, cutting himself off before he could say “buddy,” or, even more incriminating, “sweetheart.”

Fuck. 

“Heya, Sammy.” Dean stood in the middle of the chickens’ yard, which he’d just finished cleaning. The repetitive, easy motions of shoveling bird shit and straightening whatever Bastard had messed up hadn’t calmed him like he’d thought they would. Instead, he was just more nervous.

“What’s up?”

It hadn’t been that long since he’d talked to Sam. Barely a week. And Dean knew, logically, that he could call his brother whenever, but it still felt obvious he had something to say. 

“Can I ask you a question?”

The concern was evident in Sam’s voice. “Yeah, sure. Shoot.” 

Dean kicked a small clump of grass visible through the snow. Why was talking so goddamn difficult?

“How’d you know you love Eileen?” 

“Dean, if this is about-”

“Just answer the question, Sammy.” 

Bastard hopped up onto a board beside Dean’s head and stared at him. For once, Dean actually felt grateful for that. 

Sam was quiet for a moment, thinking. “I feel safe when I’m with her,” he said finally. “Not that I don’t feel safe with you, of course I do, but it’s different. Calmer, I guess.”

“Calmer.” 

“Yeah. It’s like… it’s like how you feel when you rewatch those cowboy movies. Familiar but still exciting.”

That, Dean thought, was not what he wanted to hear. Because that’s how he felt about Cas, how he’d _always_ felt about Cas, and if Sam had said anything different maybe he would have been able to get that persistent itch out of the back of his head, the one that said ‘You love him too.’ 

“Okay.” 

“Do you wanna talk about it?” Sam asked, eventually.

“No.” Dean wanted to go back to a few years ago, when he could focus all his energy on stopping whatever apocalypse was on the roster for that year and spend exactly zero time thinking about… whatever this was. “Thanks.” 

“Yeah, no problem.” Sam was about to launch into one of his well-meaning speeches, so Dean hung up. 

Bastard looked him in the eyes. Dean was really fucking sure that chicken could read minds, because the look he was getting now said that Bastard knew what Dean was hiding from, why he called Sam from the chicken coop instead of the porch, and that he was not having it. 

“Fuck off,” Dean said. 

He called Charlie as he poked around the goats’ enclosure, checking to make sure their bedding was still clean and dry. He’d already been out here once today, but he couldn’t go back inside just yet. 

“Hey, Charlie,” Dean said when she picked up on the fourth ring. (He’d been just about to give up and end the call.) “You got a sec?”

Charlie yawned. “Dean, it is so fucking early.” 

Dean looked at the sun, which had cleared the trees at the end of the field an hour ago. He’d been outside a while, and the cold morning air was starting to warm up. “It is not.” 

There was a creaking noise on her end that Dean assumed was Charlie getting out of bed. “Yeah, I got a sec. What’s up?”

That made Dean freeze. He’d woken Charlie up, and for what? To have a useless conversation to make himself feel a little less weird? He never would’ve done this before, in the old version of the world. The one Chuck ruled. He’d been a lot better about repressing feelings there.

“Never mind,” he said. “It’s nothing.” 

“I’m already up,” Charlie said pointedly. “So you might as well tell me.” 

“Well. Uh. Hypothetically. Would it be possible for someone who’s always had, um, straight feelings to suddenly have. Gay feelings.” 

Bobby the goat headbutted the back of Dean’s knee. He thought it was in support, but maybe she just wanted to make him fall over. He could never tell with her. 

“So, hypothetically, in a situation that is not about you and your feelings for Cas-”

“Charlie.”

“Okay, okay. So you’re asking me, hypothetically, if bisexual people exist.”

Dean thought he might be stupid. 

“Don’t bisexual people, I dunno, know they’re bi?”

Through the phone, Dean could hear the vague sounds of Charlie’s coffee maker starting up. “D’you think I popped outta the womb knowing I’m gay?” Charlie asked, amused. “Everybody has to figure it out sometime.” 

Dean sat down, the ground cold beneath him, and leaned on the edge of the goats’ hut. Bebe dropped her head onto his shoulder, and he gently knocked the side of his head against hers. 

“I’m fucking forty-one, Charlie,” Dean said. “How stupid do I have to be to just now be figuring it out?”

“Well, hey, you’ve been busy. Saving the world and all.”

He couldn’t remember off the top of his head how many times he’d saved the world. But he still felt like he had every time Cas had died imprinted on the backs of his eyelids. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Guess so.” 

“Dean?” Charlie said, voice gentle. “Thank you for trusting me.” 

He didn’t know what to say, so he sat, morning air cold against his face and Bebe blowing a hot cloud of breath on his ear. 

“Good luck,” Charlie said before she hung up.

So what if he was in love with Cas? If he’d been in love with Cas for probably close to a decade without realizing it? It was fine. It was still just Cas, after all. He’d managed to act completely normal for this long, there was no way he’d fuck it all up today.

As it turned out, it didn’t matter. Whisper the cat was apparently not fat but very pregnant, which Dean found out that afternoon when he came downstairs to the sound of her frantic mewling. She had clawed the blanket from the couch into a small pile in the corner of the room and stood over it uncomfortably, claws dug into the fabric. 

Dean, it is safe to say, freaked out.

He dug his phone out of his pocket and called Cas, heart rate at approximately a million miles per hour and fingers shaking nearly enough to drop the phone before he brought it to his ear. 

“I am at work,” Cas said, voice taut in a way that indicated extreme irritation. “I will be home in an hour.” 

“Your cat,” Dean hissed. He looked back at Whisper, whose meowing had grown louder. “Your fucking cat is having babies in the living room.”

“What?”

In the background on Cas’s end, Dean heard the voice of an older woman he assumed was Mabel say “You can talk to your husband on your break, honey.” 

“She’s having kittens!” Dean said again. “Right in front of me! Help!”

Cas, who had learned everything there was to learn about cats during the brief time he had Lucifer in his head, asked “Does she look like she needs help?”

“How the fuck should I know? She’s a cat!”

In front of Dean, a very small, slimy blob he assumed was a kitten pushed its way out of Whisper. He wrinkled his nose. It looked disgusting. 

“Most cats are perfectly capable of giving birth on their own,” Cas said knowledgeably. 

The slimy kitten started to squirm on the blanket. It hit Dean suddenly that this was Cas’s favorite blanket, and his shoulders dropped. 

“Thanks, Cas. Very helpful.” It had not been helpful at all.

“You’re welcome,” Cas said. He knew it. “I’ll see you in an hour.” 

Cas hung up, and Dean watched two more blobs join the first on the blanket. Whisper curled around them, licking them clean, and Dean sat on the edge of his seat the whole time, convinced that the second he looked away, something terrible would happen. 

The smile on Cas’s face when he saw the kittens almost made up for the rest of the experience. Almost. 

Whisper refused to allow anyone but Cas to go near her, hissing when Dean even so much as looked at her, but eventually, she allowed Cas to lead her to a nesting box he set up in the extra bedroom. She carried her three babies in by the scruffs of their neck and deposited them on the soft towels, curling up around them and giving Dean a death glare when he poked his head in to check on them. 

“We should take them to the vet next week,” Cas said matter-of-factly once Whisper was settled down. 

Dean could see from the look on Cas’s face that there was no way they weren’t keeping all the kittens. There was a time when he would have argued, but the realization that he was in love with Cas was way too new and Cas cared far too much. 

“You’re really good with her,” Dean said instead. “Or. With them.”

The corner of Cas’s mouth turned up in a smile. “I hope she is happy here,” he said. 

Dean wanted to say something really fucking cheesy, like “With you here, how could she not be,” but he stopped himself. That was too much, too dangerous. So he just stood there, blanking on a suitable response and looking at Cas’s smile and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes for what was probably too long.

And then the doorbell rang. 

Dean hadn’t had a doorbell for all that long. He installed it sometime in August, when he didn’t expect to need it, and it had only been used once since, by a UPS driver delivering something Cas had ordered that the driver hadn’t wanted to just leave on the porch. The doorbell was loud and jarring and sounded a little too much like an actual metal bell. Dean nearly jumped out of his skin. 

“Fuck.” Dean said. “It’s New Year’s.” 

“I should get that,” Cas said calmly, and went downstairs to do just that. Dean looked at the place where he used to be, which was now the doorway to the room Whisper was temporarily occupying. She hissed at him. 

Today had been such a long day. With the major life realization on top of the sexuality crisis on top of Cas’s new cat giving birth in the living room, he’d completely forgotten that it was a holiday, and that they’d invited people over. Sam and Eileen weren’t coming for a couple weeks, since they apparently had enough friends that they’d already had plans when Dean called them shortly before Christmas and Eileen couldn’t get the week of the 1st off from work, but Mabel and her husband were here. Dean wasn’t quite sure if Cas had invited them or if Mabel had invited herself, but it didn’t really matter, because they were here and Dean had no food prepared and was still residually freaking out. 

When Dean came downstairs five minutes later, much calmer and with a gameplan of how to scrounge up a holiday dinner without going to the store, Cas, Mabel, and her husband were already sitting on the couches in the living room, glasses of water (or, in Mabel’s husband’s case, one of Dean’s beers) in their hands. 

“This is Dean,” Cas said. Dean wasn’t sure what to do, so he put his hand up in a halfhearted wave. He’d been told, often, that he could appear very threatening, and that was worse than appearing freaked out. He was pretty sure that now he just came off as awkward. 

“Good to meet you,” Mabel said. Her voice was scratchy, like she’d smoked a lot for a long time or she was a demon who’d recently drank holy water. Dean hated that he knew what that second option sounded like. She introduced herself and her husband - Roger, whose name Dean was going to make a valiant attempt to remember - and said “Cas has told us a lot about you.” 

Dean looked at Cas, eyes wide. He hoped his expression could convey ‘What have you said to her??’ without Mabel picking up on it. Dean had done a lot of things, and few of them were good. 

But he was nothing if not a charmer, so he smiled and said “Only good things, I hope?” and Mabel laughed a little raucously and said “Are there bad things?” like it was a joke, and Dean thought he understood why Cas liked her.

He slipped out of the room pretty quickly. Saying he would be in the kitchen wasn’t an excuse, really, because he did need to be cooking. He just also needed… time, maybe? Space? 

Cas came into the kitchen a few minutes later, under the pretense of refilling people’s water glasses. He hovered there for a few moments, longer than necessary, and it wasn’t like Cas to not say something he was thinking, so Dean asked “What’s up?” He didn’t turn around from the stove, and Cas didn’t make an attempt to be in Dean’s field of view.

“Mabel thinks you’re my husband,” Cas said.

“I know.” 

“I didn’t tell her that,” Cas added. “I know you don’t feel that way about me. But I would appreciate it if you could refrain from correcting her about it.”

Dean was glad he wasn’t looking at Cas, because there was no way he could have disguised the emotions that passed across his face as Cas said that. Because saying Dean didn’t feel that way implied that Cas _did_ , that Cas considered them to be married, and that was too much. It was one thing to figure out he’d been in love with Cas the whole time. It was another to know that he had, apparently, been unofficially married to Cas for two months without his knowledge. 

“Okay,” he said. “Of course.” 

“Thank you.”

Cas went back into the living room and Dean stared into the steam rising from the vegetables he was cooking. He could get through this.

Dean re-entered the living room a good while later, intent on announcing dinner was ready. He was not prepared for what he would find. While he had been cooking, apparently, Mabel had decided that Cas needed to learn how to knit. What this meant was that Cas was surrounded by a tangle of deep green yarn, with two smooth wood knitting needles looking much more out of place in his hands than the angel blades he had been so used to wielding.

“What’s goin’ on here?” Dean said, raising an eyebrow. 

Cas made eye contact and hissed “Help me.”

Mabel was barely holding in a laugh, and her husband was smiling in a way that said he was pretty used to this. 

“You’ll get it eventually,” she said, humor suffused in her voice. “It takes practice.”

“Isn’t this supposed to be calming,” Cas said, deadpan. He lifted the snarl of yarn clinging to the needle in his right hand and looked between it, Dean, and Mabel pointedly. 

Dean walked over to the couch where Cas was sitting and took the knitting needles out of his hands. “You can’t be good at everything right away,” he said with a soft smile. 

“I used to be.”

“Sure.” 

Cas raised his eyebrows. “Like you could do better.”

There was absolutely no way Dean was trying that, so he cleared his throat and said “It’s time for dinner!” in what may have been the least subtle attempt to change the subject ever. 

Dinner wasn’t, to his surprise, horrible. Mabel was nice in the way that people are when they’ve lived their whole lives without seeing a city, laughing a little too loud at her own jokes and assuming that everyone is intimately familiar with the social intricacies of north Kansas, and her husband was mellow, mostly keeping quiet and smiling fondly at his wife’s comments. Dean got into a conversation about cars with Roger that he was surprised to find he was actually interested in, even if Roger had horrible opinions - pickup trucks, even vintage, could simply never be preferable to a good classic muscle car. Apparently Roger had a son who worked organizing bike rallies, and Dean had never even so much as considered motorcycles - there wasn’t any place to keep a hunting kit! Nowhere to sleep if you couldn’t find a motel! - but when Roger talked about his son’s work with them, Dean could start to see the appeal. 

“So, Dean,” Mabel said about halfway through the meal, when everyone had started to slow down their food intake and actually enjoy what was left on their plates. “What do you do? Cas is always so vague about things.” 

This was, Dean thought, an excellent question. What did he do? Puttering around an old house and making sure Sam’s hunting network was all in working order didn’t really count as a job, and neither did messing with his cars or taking care of the animals. And it wasn’t like ‘recovering from an entire lifetime of being actively fucked over by God himself’ was a viable answer.

“I’m. Uh. Unemployed.” 

“Oh.” 

Maybe it was time for a lie. Just a little one, though. Close enough to the truth. Dean looked to Roger, judging whether he could get away with the lie. He thought he could. “I used to be in the army. Got out last year.” 

He was right. Roger didn’t ask where he served, he just nodded. 

And thank God, Mabel didn’t ask any more personal questions. Dean didn’t have any kind of suitable fake backstory cooked up, not one he’d be able to remember and use again. One of these days, he was going to have to come up with a version of how he and Cas met. He was probably going to have to find a real job sometime, too. But Mabel turned to Cas and asked “So how’s the cat?” and Dean felt himself relax.

Mabel and Roger left around eleven. They turned on the TV and watched the ball drop in New York, ringing in the new year when they still had another hour of the old one, and then Mabel and Roger piled in their car and ran into every pothole Dean could see in the driveway before fading into the night. 

Dean and Cas rang in the actual new year, in Central Time, from their back porch. Dean turned off all the lights, and this far out in the country there was so little light pollution that he felt he could see every star in the sky. It wasn’t that cold for a Kansas December night, but he stood close to Cas anyway, and when his phone started making obnoxious kazoo noises at the stroke of midnight, he leaned into his side even further.

“Happy New Year,” Dean said softly. 

Standing out here, with only the starlight around them, Cas looked otherworldly, like he had twelve years ago in that barn. Dean felt his breath catch in his throat when he looked at Cas. He wasn’t an angel anymore, but the echoes of that angelic power still lived in him. And he’d chosen to stand outside with Dean while the dew was freezing on the grass and live with him in his house in the middle of nowhere when he could have anything in the world. The weight of it hit him like a punch to the chest. 

“Can I do something?” Cas asked, quiet enough that if Dean wanted to, he could have pretended not to hear it. But the night was still and silent, and he wanted so badly to know what Cas wanted to do. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Of course.” 

Cas turned to face him. “I’m told,” he said, steadily and sincerely, “that this is good luck.” 

Cas reached up with one hand to cup Dean’s face and pulled him in, leaving the softest of kisses on his lips. Dean’s eyes instinctually fell closed, and he didn’t open them as he felt Cas pull away. 

“Happy New Year, Dean,” Cas said. 

Dean only opened his eyes when he heard the porch door open and then close behind him. He let out a shaky breath and stared up at the stars, his breath fogging up in the air and disappearing into the night. He was so done for. 

“Dean?” Charlie asked. “Didn’t you already call today?”

From Dean’s point of view, he had not. Today, despite it being about 3am, was January 1st. He had called her yesterday, and after trying and failing to go to sleep, called again. It was way too cold to be outside, the temperature having dropped and clouds rolled in during his attempt at sleep, so he sat on the stairs, careful not to let them creak and let Cas know he was awake. 

“Am I not allowed to call twice?” Dean asked, joking. 

“Shouldn’t you be, I dunno, doing something?” Dean could picture Charlie’s exaggerated eyebrow-wiggle like she was there, the joke innuendo she thought was hilarious. (She was usually right.) Her words were slurring a little, a combination of tiredness and alcohol from the holiday, and for the second time that day, Dean felt guilty about taking up her time. 

“You busy?” 

“Guess not.” 

Dean was silent for a moment, scratching his fingernail along the seam of his jeans by his knee. It made a quiet sound that was oddly soothing. 

“I don’t know how to do this,” he said. 

“Do what?” 

If it had been any other time, Charlie would have made a joke, and Dean would have laughed to deflect attention and he would have gone on resolutely not thinking about things he didn’t want to think about. But it was 3am on New Year’s Day, and Dean was done avoiding things. 

“Cas loves me. Like, _loves me_ loves me.” 

“And? You like him, right?”

Dean got why Charlie was confused. He really did. If they both loved each other, what was the problem? Why was he calling her in the middle of the night instead of off spending quality time with his angel? But he couldn’t, for so many reasons. Because Cas was so sure about him and Dean still, even after everything, couldn’t help feeling like he didn’t deserve it. Because the knowledge of this feeling was still so new that it felt like his chest had been torn open. 

“His coworkers think we’re married.”

“Oh.” Charlie said. “Well you are, kinda.”

“Charlie, he gave up his grace for me. And I’m just… I’ve been in maybe two real relationships, ever. And I fucked both of those up.”

“And you’re scared you’re gonna fuck this one up too.” 

Dean nodded. “Yeah,” he said quietly. 

“Dean, you killed god. _The_ god. You’re gonna be fine.” 

“That was mostly Jack.” 

“Do I even need to cite the other apocalypses you’ve stopped?” 

Dean smiled hesitantly. “No.” 

“Go get your man, Dean.” He could hear Charlie smiling through the phone. “I’m here if you need anything, but if you call me when I’m asleep again, I’m going to start putting Do Not Disturb on.” 

“Do Not Disturb?”

“Good _night_.” She wasn’t really annoyed, though, and Dean thought, not for the first time, how lucky he was to have her as a friend.

“Thanks, Charlie,” he said. “Night.” 

He sat on the stairs for a while, thinking maybe Charlie was right. Maybe there was nothing stopping him and Cas from being together, not anymore. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t still scared as hell. 

Despite his late night, Dean was still up before Cas the next morning. He was making pancakes in the kitchen, a small stack already on a plate beside the stove, and working through what he should say. He’d come up with just about nothing. 

Cas stumbled in, eyes half-open and hair sticking up from sleep, and he immediately grabbed a cup of coffee. 

“Mornin,’” Dean said. 

Cas squinted at him. He took a long drink of his coffee and then refilled the mug.

Well. It was now or never, so Dean asked the first thing that came to mind. “Did you not want me to tell Mabel we aren’t married because you want us to be?”

The coffee cup Cas had been holding made a very loud thud when he set it down abruptly on the table. Dean flipped another pancake out of the frying pan and onto the plate, then poured more batter into the pan. He thought he was doing pretty good at acting like he wasn’t incredibly invested in Cas’s answer.

“You know I don’t expect anything from you, Dean,” Cas said. “I am happy with the way things are.” 

“I’m not asking what you expect from me.” Dean picked up the pancake he had just finished cooking and took a bite. “I’m asking, if it was just up to you, is that what you want.”

“Yes.” 

Dean nearly choked on his pancake. He’d known that’s what Cas would say, after last night. But he hadn’t been prepared, hadn’t expected the simple honesty that was so very Cas. 

“Oh,” he said.

“I can go, if you want.” Cas pushed his chair back from the table like he was about to stand up. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. And I apologize for overstepping my bounds last night. I shouldn’t have kissed you, but Eileen did say it was good luck.”

Dean stood there, frozen, as Cas stood up and quietly walked away. He needed to say something, anything, but a lifetime of pushing his feelings down worked against him and it felt impossible. It wasn’t until Cas was halfway to the front door that Dean said “Stay. Please.” 

Cas turned to him, face open and vulnerable. And Dean wanted so badly to tell him. To say _I love you, too_ , or _you don’t have to leave_. But there was something blocking the words in his throat and he could smell the pancake starting to burn behind him but there was nothing he could do, because taking his eyes off Cas in this moment would be letting him go. 

“I don’t know what I would do if you left,” he said. That was as honest as he could be. 

Cas nodded once and moved back to the kitchen. He didn’t sit back down, instead standing behind his chair and leaving his cup of coffee on the table. 

“Please know your answer to this question doesn’t influence whether I will stay,” Cas said slowly. “I don’t want to leave either. But do you want me here as a friend or as a lover?”

Dean’s single “Yes” felt like the most difficult word he’d ever forced himself to say. He wanted to say more, but his mouth had forgotten how to speak. 

“Okay,” Cas said, and picked up his coffee. “Can I have some of those pancakes?”

Dean nodded. _They’re for you_ , he wanted to say. He was done talking. He flipped the pancake in the pan and it showed a scorched, dark brown underside. That one would be for him, then. 

As soon as he was out of pancake batter to cook, Dean rushed out of the kitchen, retreating to the chicken coop and goat enclosure for his morning chores. He stayed out there longer than he probably needed to, freezing his nose off in the January wind and letting Bebe slobber on the knee of his jeans in what he was choosing to take as emotional support. 

He grabbed his phone off the counter when he dropped today’s two eggs off inside and went back out. His fingers were nearly frozen stiff, but he managed to call Sam. 

“Hey, Dean,” Sam said, sounding confused. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, Sammy. Everything’s good.” 

There was a noise on Sam’s end, like a door had just closed. 

“Just getting back from my run,” he explained. “What’s up?”

A gust of wind blew through the field, and Dean squinted his eyes against it. “If I got married, would that be... okay with you?”

“You didn’t get hit by another love spell, did you?” Sam asked, only half-joking.

“Would I be calling you if I had?”

“Dean-” and there it was, Sam’s concerned, ‘why are you not behaving like a regular person’ voice. “You called me yesterday morning asking what love feels like, and one day later you’re asking me for permission to get married. Something’s going on.” 

“Nothing’s going on, Sammy. It’s just a question.” 

“This is about Cas, right?”

Dean sighed dramatically, mostly for Sam’s benefit. “Why does everything in my love life have to be about Cas?”

Sam had the nerve to laugh. “Because for the last, like, eight years, it has been.”

“Eight years?” Maybe Cas had said, when he’d confessed the first time, that he’d loved Dean for a while. Dean wasn’t really sure what he’d said, a lot of it had gotten lost in the shock of the “I love you” and Cas’s death. But there was no way it had been that long. Right?

“At least.”

“Shit.”

A noise that sounded like Sam was chopping vegetables on a cutting board started up. “So is it about Cas?”

Dean sighed, for real this time. From across the yard, Patience looked at him with a death glare. “Yeah,” he said. 

“Have you ever been on a date with him? Does he even know you aren’t just best friends?”

“...Maybe?”

The chopping noise stopped. “Dean.” 

Dean scratched the top of Bebe’s head and she leaned into his touch. “Hm?”

“You can’t just get married to someone you’ve never even been on a date with.” 

That sounded like a challenge. Actually, Dean was pretty sure Cas had watched a show recently where the contestants did just that. “Watch me. You said yourself it’s been eight years.” 

Sam took a breath, and Dean could picture him closing his eyes for a moment to pull himself together. “Don’t you dare get married without me.”

Dean smiled, cocky and sure. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” 

He hung up before Sam could say anything and met Bebe’s eyes. “Looks like I’ve got some work to do, doesn’t it?” He laughed and stood up to head back to the house.

Back inside, Cas was sitting on the couch, once again holding the knitting needles and green yarn. Dean had seen Cas angry many times over the years, and he was a little scared that the way Cas was looking at the yarn was a lot closer to the way he’d looked at Raphael during the height of Heaven’s civil war than the look of irritation he might get when Dean was being obnoxious (as he frequently was). 

“You know you don’t have to keep doing that,” he said. If Cas kept at it, he was pretty sure either those knitting needles that he thought were Mabel’s were going to end up snapped in half or something else was going to get broken.

“I am going to figure it out.” Cas’s voice was flat. Determined. 

“Yeah, but you don’t have to.” Cas gave Dean a death glare, so Dean kept going. “It’s a hobby, right? This isn’t some kind of life or death job, Cas.” 

Cas repeated, “I will be good at this.” 

Dean raised an eyebrow. “Sure.” He kept his boots and coat on, just grabbing his keys as he walked through the house. “I’m going to town. For, uh, cat stuff. What kind of stuff does that cat need, anyway?” 

“I’ll text you a list.” 

When Cas made no move to put down the knitting, which was looking like slightly less of a tangled mess than it had been the evening before, Dean walked out the front door, closing it behind him. It took twenty minutes to drive into town. Cas would have texted him by then.

Cas did not. Dean called him when he parked outside the Petco, feigning an annoyance he knew Cas knew he didn’t feel as Cas rattled off the insanely long list of things he needed to buy for the cats. A litter box, several different types of food, scratch pads “so she doesn’t ruin the couch,” and the list went on. 

The Petco was mostly filled with other families, moms buying things for their kids’ pets and grandparents with their equally elderly dogs. At first, Dean felt out of place - this was a normal place with normal people. This was what other people did, go to the store to buy cat toys for a cat they were keeping because Dean wanted to make Cas happy. (He didn’t mind the cat either, per se, but he definitely wouldn’t say he liked Whisper just yet, either.)

But, hell, even if Dean hadn’t lived the most normal of lives, he was in a pretty apple-pie one now. He sorta had a kid, who was God but also came by for movie nights and holidays like any kid that had recently moved out, and he lived with a guy he- he loved, because yeah, he did love Cas. Even if he’d always imagined himself dying young, and thought of having a family with some woman (always a woman) as a sort of pipe dream, what he had now felt right in a way that idea of a family, one he’d almost had with Lisa and Ben and even before that, in the djinn dream world all those years ago, never had. He was gonna propose to Cas, because that was what Cas wanted and, behind the part of himself that still couldn’t believe this was his life, he thought it was pretty fucking fantastic too. 

So Dean filled his Petco cart with cat stuff, throwing anything in there that seemed important or like something Whisper might like when she had recovered enough that she could come out of the guest bedroom, and he checked out with a smile on his face. 

A text lit up his phone as he walked into Smith Center’s only thrift store/pawnshop, but Dean didn’t stop to check it. He didn’t have much idea of what he was looking for, but he’d pulled into the parking lot knowing two things: one, that if he ordered a ring online it wouldn’t arrive for three weeks or so and there was no way he was going to sit back and not propose for that long. (He honestly was surprised that he was going out and buying a ring first, not just asking Cas in the middle of the night or something.) And two, that he wouldn’t be caught dead in a jewelry store. 

There was not a lot of variety in ring selection at this thrift store. Maybe Dean should have waited until he had some excuse to go up to Hastings, to see bigger and better shops, but he was already here. 

Three of the rings looked like they were antique, for women, and very expensive. Another was so gaudy Dean was a little surprised it hadn’t started life as an arcade prize. One was a toe ring. That left two rings that could be reasonably said to be for men. He caught sight of the first one, and, well, it really had been a miracle that he’d gotten this far into his plan without losing it a little.

The first ring was plain silver, one line etched into it in a gentle, wave-like pattern. It didn’t look that much like his dad’s ring, but it was close enough. John Winchester had been dead for fourteen years, but Dean could still remember a silver ring making contact with his face, tearing at the flesh on his cheekbone. He’d known the feeling of that ring driven into his stomach. Hell, it was one of the reasons he’d worn so many rings as a teenager - they weren’t brass knuckles, but they sure gave him an advantage in a fight. 

His dad would’ve killed him if he knew what Dean was doing. That he’d given up hunting and was gonna get married to - not a man, but a guy who was definitely closer to being a man than a woman. 

And that was- that was fucking crazy. His dad had been pissed before, beat the shit out of Dean when he’d found out about him and Lee. And so Dean had made a firm line in his head - he was straight, because if he was going to settle down with anyone it would be a woman. Things like with Lee didn’t count, because that was just to blow off steam. And with Benny, because even if he had feelings for him, that hadn’t even been on earth. And yeah, maybe it was a stupid line, but there was a difference between fucking and loving and Dean was well and truly across it now.

But that was okay. Not really, it fucking wasn’t, but Dean had moved on. His dad wasn’t here. He was dead, and so was Chuck, and for the first time the only person writing Dean’s story was Dean himself. And Dean didn’t have to be straight in this story. 

The second ring was smooth and black, with a stripe of what looked like real gold set into the center. Dean didn’t have a fucking clue what ring size Cas wore, but that was a problem for later. He handed over his twenty-five bucks and left the store with the ring in a box in his pocket, ready to chase his future. 

Cas helped carry the Petco bags in, knitting finally (thankfully) abandoned on the couch. There was a lot of stuff, and Dean didn’t really know what he was supposed to do with all of it. Cas did. One of the perks about Cas formerly having been an angel, and having once been obsessed with facts about most forms of life, especially bees and cats, was that Cas knew pretty much everything there is to know about this stuff. 

The bag of cat toys was discarded in the living room, but Dean was instructed to take the scratching post he had been lugging around up to the guest bedroom. He didn’t even make it inside the room. As soon as he opened the door, Whisper stood up, fur puffing up and hissing at him. Dean backed down the hallway, nearly tripping over his own feet in an attempt to get away.

“That cat hates me,” he said to Cas, who had watched the whole thing from the top of the stairs. 

“She’ll come around.” 

When Cas opened the door, Whisper didn’t make a sound. 

Since Whisper still wouldn’t let Dean into the room, or even into the doorway, he sat on the stairs as Cas assembled the metric fuckton of stuff that the cats apparently needed. He checked his phone; the text from earlier was apparently from Eileen, and it read _you’re getting married?????_

There was another text, sent about five minutes after the first, that was just a string of question marks. 

_Maybe_ , Dean typed back. _I haven’t asked him yet._

It took Eileen a few minutes to respond. In the guest bedroom, he could hear Cas quietly swearing. Dean wished he could be in there just to see what had gotten Cas so worked up he needed to swear at it out loud. 

_but you’re going to ask him._ Eileen’s reply read. 

_Yeah_. Dean said. Something in his chest felt warm. Yeah, maybe he should’ve had a more in-depth conversation with Cas about their feelings first, but this just felt like the right thing to do. He was gonna get married, and he was thrilled about it. 

Eileen’s text bubble popped up and disappeared three times over the next couple minutes. Finally, she said _congratulations_

She immediately followed it up with _I hope he knows what he’s getting into._

_Hey!_

Dean can almost picture the smug smile on Eileen’s face when her next message came through. _he’s not the only one dating a Winchester. I love you two, but you’re nuts._

_gotta go - work. and you better not do a courthouse marriage before we get there._

_I haven’t even asked him!_

Sam and Eileen were coming to visit in a week and a half. The ring sat heavy in his pocket. He turned off his phone as Cas emerged from the guest bedroom, cat fur stuck to his pant legs and an exhausted smile on his face. 

Despite having the ring, which Dean hid in the pocket of one of his lighter flannels, he didn’t propose right away. He might be going about things in the wrong order (marriage before or equalling the confession of feelings), but damn if he wasn’t going to do the proposal right. 

He waited until the next day. 

When Cas was at work, Dean opened the Impala’s trunk. If he was going to do this, settle down, he had to accept he was really done hunting. So he sat there, looking at the fully loaded hunting kit in the trunk’s secret compartment, for nearly an hour. 

In the end, he didn’t take everything out. He left some salt, holy water, a machete or two, and a shotgun with both regular and silver bullets. Just in case. But the trunk still was emptier than Dean had ever seen it, and he figured that was a pretty good sign. He didn’t want to be one of those crazies with a million gun lockers (and he didn’t love the idea of a gun locker in the first place - what if he needed something and couldn’t get to it?) so he shoved everything in a duffel bag in the house’s small attic, close enough to the access trapdoor he could get it quickly but hidden enough that, if non-hunters were in the house, they wouldn’t think he’d lost his mind. 

Checking to make sure he still had time before Cas came home, Dean climbed into the newly-emptied Impala and drove to town. There was still a part of him that didn’t want to do this, that said getting a job and settling down just wasn’t for him, but over the last year, that part had gotten a lot quieter. 

“You hirin’?” Dean asked at the first of Smith Center’s two auto repair shops. 

“Maybe,” the guy behind the counter said. He was young, in his twenties but somehow worn through, and sported a painful-looking sunburn on the back of his neck. “You any good?”

And this part was easy. It was like flipping a switch in his brain and suddenly Dean was all confidence. They would hire him, because he was damn good, and he knew it. 

“I know my way around an engine,” Dean said. He nodded to the Impala in the parking lot, shiny and looking brand-new. “She’s got four hundred thousand miles on her, not that you’d ever know it.”

The mechanic, whose name tag read “Walt,” looked between Dean and the Impala. “She’s a beaut, I’ll give ya that.” 

“Course she is,” Dean said. “Been fixing up cars since I was a kid.” 

Walt raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you come inside and talk to the boss?”

Dean smiled. That was a win. He’d never had a job before, but it looked like for the first time in his life, he was about to make an honest living. 

Armed with the knowledge of his trial day at the shop the day after next, Dean figured he was ready. All he had to do now was make the proposal nice. He’d seen enough go down in the chick flicks he not-so-secretly loved that he had some ideas, and he still had a couple hours before Cas would be home. Perfect. 

It wasn’t perfect. Dean didn’t know what he’d been expecting, really. Some kind of movie magic thing with snow gently falling around them that somehow wasn’t fucking freezing? All the movie proposals he’d seen, which was a lot, now that he thought about it, had either been at fancy restaurants or outside, and neither of those were going to happen. It was cold as shit outside, and Dean didn’t see the point in so-called ‘nice’ restaurants that were just going to overcharge them for food he could cook at home. 

He ended up with a compromise. A home-cooked baked ziti that maybe wasn’t the nicest thing ever, but it wasn’t leftovers and it would taste pretty damn good. He tried really fucking hard to put candles on the table, but after bringing them out, getting so nervous about them he could feel his heartbeat speed up and his hands start to shake, and putting them away again a good five times, Dean accepted that was just not going to happen. He made do with a string of what Sam had once called fairy lights but Dean was pretty sure were just uncolored Christmas lights around the table. And it looked damn nice. 

Cas got home around 5 and immediately flopped onto the couch, narrowly avoiding being impaled by his own knitting needles, which he glared at. 

“How was work?” Dean asked. He perched himself on the opposite armrest of the couch, nervously tapping the ring box in the front pocket of his jeans. 

Cas tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling. 

“That bad, huh.” 

“I never thought I’d miss the Christmas music,” Cas said, meeting Dean’s eyes with a dead stare. “But if one more kid plays that Pussycat song…”

“Wh-”

“ _Don’t_ make me explain.”

Dean raised his hands in a mock-surrender. “Dinner’s in the oven,” he said instead. “Should be ready in an hour.” 

Cas nodded. “I’m going to check on the cats.” 

Apparently ‘checking on the cats’ was a lot of work, because Cas didn’t come downstairs until after the ziti was out of the oven. 

“How are they doing?” Dean asked. He hadn’t seen the kittens since they were born. It had only been a couple days, but he assumed they weren’t slimy balls of fur anymore. 

“Good,” Cas said, face easing into what was almost a smile. “They’re good.”

“Is it another holiday already?” Cas asked when he entered the kitchen. And… yeah, for someone who had no idea what Dean was planning, that was a pretty good guess. 

“Nah,” Dean said, trying his best not to give away that something was up. “Just wanted to do something nice.” 

Cas did smile then, and Dean felt its warmth like Cas was the sun. 

Dean made it halfway through dinner. Cas was laughing at something stupid he’d said, and he hastily swallowed his own mouthful of pasta to say “D’you wanna get married?”

Cas’s laughter stopped abruptly. “Dean, if this is about what I said yesterday morning, you know-”

“You don’t expect anything from me, yeah. You’ve said.”

“Then why…” Cas’s forehead scrunches up in confusion, and it’s unfairly adorable. 

“Because I want to, dumbass.” 

“If you’re proposing to me, I don’t think you should call me a dumbass.” 

Dean sighed for dramatic effect. “Fine. Lemme do this right.” He got out of his chair and dropped down on one knee - which he was really too old to be doing, his knee complained as soon as it made contact with the floor. With a little difficulty, he dug the ring out of his pocket. “Cas, d’you want to get married?”

As soon as he said it, Dean thought he probably should’ve had a big speech. Something like what Cas said to him before the Empty took him, a long thing about how knowing Cas had changed him, given him a faith he’d been lacking. But the words would never have made it past his lips. 

Cas went through a complicated series of expressions. His eyes narrowed before widening to an almost cartoonish extent. His mouth hung open. 

“Do you mean it?” he almost whispered. 

Dean raised an eyebrow. “Would I be doing this if I didn’t?”

Cas seemed at a loss for words, so Dean joked “It’s not for tax reasons or anything, Cas,” as he rose from his protesting knee and settled back into his chair. “When two men love each other…”

“Of course I love you, Dean,” Cas said, words tilting up into a question, “but I was under the impression you didn’t feel the same way.” 

Dean scratched the back of his head for something to do with his hands. The ring lay on the table between them, a question still unanswered. “I, uh, didn’t realize until recently. But. Um. I do.” 

“Oh,” Cas said. “And you’re sure about this?”

“Yeah. I think I’ve been, uh. I have for a while.” Dean still couldn’t say ‘love’, and he fucking hated that. Cas deserved to hear it, and he wanted to be able to say it, but something in his throat closed up around the word and wouldn’t let it escape. But he’d learned sign language for Eileen, and ‘I love you’ was a pretty basic sign. He could do that. So he signed ‘I love you’ at Cas, whose eyes widened somehow even more. “I just didn’t know that’s what I felt.”

Cas didn’t say anything. The pasta was getting cold on their plates, and Dean wasn’t sure if he’d completely fucked this up. 

“So. Do you want to get married?” he asked again. 

“Of course,” Cas said. 

The ring was too big, but Dean’s fingers laced with Cas’s and it couldn’t fall off. They kissed across the table, smiling giddily when they broke apart. They held hands for the rest of the meal, ignoring how much harder that made it to use their forks, and picked up where they left off once the food was gone. 

Several hours later, Dean opened his phone and texted the most recent contact _He said yes_. 

He thought that was Eileen, until the resulting response, _YOU PROPOSED TO HIM????_ , came through. He checked the name on the message notification. It was from Charlie. 

On January 8, Dean followed Cas into the vet’s office, holding the cat carrier containing Whisper and her kittens in both hands. Cas’s ring had been properly resized, and he’d found an all-black one for Dean somewhere, though for the life of him Dean had no idea where. 

Whisper still didn’t like him, but she’d at least given up hissing in exchange for a plaintive, near-constant meow when Cas had put her into the carrier Dean held. In the thirty minutes she’d been in there, it hadn’t stopped. Dean was starting to regret saying they could keep her. 

“I know,” he said to the cats. The kittens still hadn’t opened their eyes, but Whisper was glaring at him, complete with direct eye contact. “Being in a cage sucks. But you’ll get out soon, okay?”

Whisper did not look any happier for this news. 

It turned out she didn’t have a chip, so when the four cats went to the back for their vaccinations, they officially belonged to Cas and Dean. 

“So,” Dean said, fake-calm, as they waited for the cats to return. “Sam and Eileen are coming this weekend.”

Cas nodded.

“They’d kill us if we got married without them.” 

“What are you suggesting?” Cas asked, half his mouth curved up into a smile Dean could almost class as mischievous. 

Once the cats were back in their carrier, Dean stepped outside the office. Cas was still inside paying the bill and making Whisper an appointment to be neutered - he could not handle another round of kittens. 

Scrolling through his contacts, he found Jody pretty quick. She picked up on the first ring. 

“What’s up, kiddo?” she asked. 

“Hey, Jody,” Dean said. “How would you and the girls like to come to a last-minute wedding?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and then they get married :D key points of the wedding that I'm not writing:  
> -they’re wearing tacky thrift store clothes.  
> -the ceremony itself takes place in the front yard (the goats are in the back yard) under a rental tent.  
> -Charlie goes with Dean to get his thrift store clothes and Claire goes with Cas and bullies him the whole time.  
> -Jack is the flower boy.  
> -Dean and Cas fight over who gets to have Sam for their best man so ultimately there is no best man. Sam makes a speech anyway.
> 
> if you've stuck around this long i love you. seriously. this started out as my way of denying the finale and it grew to mean a lot to me, so i hope other people have been able to enjoy it as well. if you did, i'd love to hear about it in a comment <3


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